Techno-enviro assessment and ranking of Turkey for use of home-scale solar water heaters

Abstract

Roughly 8 percent of the final energy used for heating and cooling of buildings and industries around the world is provided by renewable energies. Nevertheless, a major part of the energy consumed for heating is based on fossil fuels. Turkey's energy policies are aimed at providing secure, sustainable, and cost-effective energy, enhancing domestic energy production, and increasing energy efficiency in order to reduce consumption. To this end, renewable energies play an important role in Turkey's energy policies and, given the high energy potentials in Turkey, if these potentials are sufficiently realized, they can make a significant contribution to meeting future’s energy demands. Therefore, in the present work for the first time, the use of solar water heaters (SWHs) in household scale has been investigated, by using climate data of radiation intensity and temperature for 45 stations in Turkey. Technical and environmental analysis was carried out by commercial software TSOL PRO 5.5 on two types of flat plate (FP) water heaters and evacuated tubes (ET), also, these stations are ranked using GAMS 24.1 software and DEA-BCC and DEA-Additive methods. The results show that the efficiency of ET water heaters is better than that of FP water heaters at all stations. For the FP SWH, the annual generation of heating, the annual heating generation for domestic hot water, and annual CO2 emission mitigation were 132,605 kWh, 120,365 kWh, and 68.4 t, whereas the same parameters were 228,814 kWh, 128,578 kWh, and 93.4 t for the ET SWH. For the FP collector, the results show that Akhisar, Bodrum, Finike, Hakkari and Iskenderun stations are superior stations and Sinop is the inappropriate station in both models, DEA-BCC and DEA-Additive models. On the other hand, for ET collector, the results show that Akhisar, Bodrum, Finike, Hakkari, Dalaman and Iskenderun stations are superior stations in both DEA-BCC and DEA-Additive methods and in DEA-BCC method, Zonguldak station and in DEA-Additive method Sinop station is the inappropriate station.