ENERGY ANALYSIS OF THE INTEGRATION CONFIGURATIONS OF SOLAR COOLING SYSTEMS IN DISTRICT HEATING AND COOLING NETWORKS

Air-conditioning has become an important industry in the last decades in developed countries. That has caused a substantial increase in the buildings energy consumption and as a consequence, an important increase in the use of fossil fuels and carbon dioxide emissions that are directly related with global warming and climate change. One way to reduce these effects is the use of solar energy for cooling. According to some experts in solar cooling, the most energy-efficient and cost-effective solar cooling systems among all the technologies available are the ones based on solar thermal collectors and thermal chillers. Usually these systems are designed in a small scale with high economic costs. One option to reduce dramatically these costs is the integration of the solar cooling systems in district heating and cooling networks (DHC). The problem that arises in this case is that there are many integration configurations of the solar thermal collectors and thermal chillers in the DHC. In this work, the possible integration configurations are identified. Then, these configurations are analysed from the energy and primary energy points of view for the specific case of the solar cooling plant at the Technological Park of Cerdanyola del Valles. To perform the analysis it is used the simulation software for thermal processes TRNSYS.