Abstract
A significant part of energy consumption in Northern countries goes to heating. There is no consensus about the most efficient source of renewable heat there. This paper presents a field study for a 7.8 m2 vacuum tube solar collector facility that is conservatively located in the cloudy and cold climate conditions of western Norway. We analyse a year-long operation by examining the rig’s statistics. We show that in Nordic latitudes with rainy climate conditions, a domestic solar hot water system can produce 2200 kWhth/y at a thermal efficiency of up to 72%. The average amount of heat produced by the collectors was up to 14.7 kWhth/d. This was enough to sustain the domestic hot water demand in an average Norwegian household for 6 months with a short period of auxiliary heating. In conclusion, we calculated that a 3× upscaled area facility would deliver over 25 kWhth covering six months of total heat consumption. The payback period for the facility is 12 years.
Highlights
The solar collector facility is located at the Western Norway University of Applied
The laboratory consists of the photovoltaic (PV) system with a total area of 9.9 m2, 5 m2 solar concentrator from Riza+ [16], a vacuum tube solar collector facility, a greenhouse, a 16.2 m2 custom-designed passive house with balanced ventilation, and a battery bank
The average temperature was below 10 ◦ C in this seasons meaning that that temperature difference ∆T becomes around 70 ◦ C for a minimum hot-water temperature set in Norway for thermal systems
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. According to the International Energy Agency, in 2018, about half of the total end consumption of energy was related to residential and industrial heating. Of the total household energy consumption, space and water heating can take up to 80%, according to Eurostat data from 2016 [1]. Increasing the share of renewables such as solar thermal energy in residential heating can be one of many steps towards achieving energy savings
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