Solar Cooling for the Sunbelt Regions: Show Cases on System and Component Level & Adapted Components

This document is the final report for joint activities A2, “Adapted components”, and B1, “Show cases on system and component level” of the IEA SHC Task 65, “Solar Cooling for the Sunbelt Regions. The first part of the report presents results from 32 investigated projects across 18 countries representing a range of 10 weather profiles such as the tropical wet and dry (Aw), hot desert (BWh), hot semi-arid (BSh), hot summer-Mediterranean (Csa), warm summer Mediterranean (Csb), humid subtropic (Cfa), monsoon-influenced humid subtropical (Cwa), hot summer humid continental climate zones. The 32 projects studied are over 17.06 MW of thermal cooling projects. The essential findings are: • Solar Thermal (ST) cooling is by far the most applied solar cooling technology over solar electric cooling. Of the cases studies, 30% of cases studied use ETCs, Flat plate collectors (17%), Fresnel collectors (17%), Parabolic trough collectors (10%), and PV panels (10%). These are some of the most preferred options. • Of the available ST cooling techniques, 71% of them use solar absorption whereas, 19% use solar adsorption cooling and other technologies such as ejector cooling and PV assisted cooling (3% each) • The major application was in public buildings (34%), with an average working span of 8 hours/day, while some others were utilized in the domestic building (25%), process industry (9%), and food processing sector, among others. This comprehensive analysis underscores the effectiveness and versatility of solar thermal cooling technologies across diverse climatic conditions, paving the way for their broader adoption in various sectors and contributing to sustainable energy solutions in sunbelt regions worldwide.