Investigation of a novel space heating scheme based on evacuated flat-plate solar collector and virtual energy storage

Abstract

Solar space heating is an effective method to solve the high energy consumption problem of buildings. However, traditional solar space heating systems usually suffer from spacious land occupation problems that hamper their development. In this paper, a solar space heating system based on a novel type of evacuated flat-plate solar collector (EFPC) is proposed. An experimental study and district energy system demonstration are carried out to prove its feasibility and superiority. The results denote that this system can enormously upgrade solar energy efficiency and curtail land occupation by 66.98%. Moreover, the solar energy resource and the heating demand profile usually have an opposite variation tendency during the whole day, which results in a giant energy storage scale and land occupation. A solar space heating scheme based on EFPC and virtual energy storage is proposed to cope with this daily solar energy mismatch issue and the results manifest that the peak load can be shifted by more than 50%. Therefore, this solar space heating scheme can immensely reduce the land occupation of solar plants and it has a humongous prospect for achieving solar energy penetration and carbon emission reduction goals.