Solar Thermal
The solar thermal system, with some back-up from the biomass boiler, is designed to provide all of the energy required for cooling in the Renewable Energy House. Modern solar thermal systems work in both daylight & sunlight and solar thermal is now used in many applications such as heating, cooling, industrial process heating, and desalination.
The Renewable Energy House provides less-than-ideal conditions for a solar thermal system. All roofs are at least partially shaded by the surrounding tall buildings, there is no directly south facing roof and the available surface area for solar thermal collectors is limited. However, the east-west solution on this building works very effectively in this designed-for-cooling application. For virtually the whole of the hottest section of the day during the summer months, the sun shines directly onto either the east or west-facing bank of collectors and so the cooling demand and supply curve directly correspond to each other. Solar cooling is a technology with a bright future because the times of high cooling demand coincide with the highest yields from solar collectors. Typically solar thermal systems designed for domestic hot water and central heating work at temperatures up to 60 °C. A solar cooling system requires higher input temperatures, in this case between 70 and 95 °C. For this reason, high performance collectors improve the overall efficiency of the system. The Renewable Energy House features 30m2 of evacuated tube collectors on the east roof and 30m2 of special high performance flat plate collectors on the west roof. For other medium-to-high temperature applications such as industrial process heat or solar thermal power generation, special collectors are available which produce temperatures up to 250°C.
Solar Thermal Heating and Cooling System equipment sponsors:
