This paper explores the potential for solar thermal cooling to succeed commercially, and more specifically, the application scenarios where this is most likely. This mainly philosophical contribution hopes to highlight directions for future research.

This book focuses on the challenge that Australia faces in transitioning to renewable energy and regenerating its cities via a transformation of its built environment. It identifies innovative and effective pathways for decarbonising the built environment from applied research undertaken by the Co-Operative Research Centre for Low Carbon Living.

This project used the insights gleaned from CRCLCL Program 3 social research projects, particularly RP3029, to develop a web-based platform to support a transition to a low carbon and energy efficient residential housing sector. The platform provides a mechanism for renovators to socialise, discuss their renovations, communicate with trades and manage their renovation projects adopting renovation options in the process that minimises the environmental impact and carbon emissions of the house.

Solar desiccant air-conditioning is an emerging technology that offers the promise of reducing reliance on grid connected electricity for providing comfort air-conditioning. Development of a method of assessing the seasonal energy savings of these devices would enable a fair comparison with alternative devices. This could be used in policy support mechanisms to assist industry growth.

Solar heating and cooling (SHC) systems are currently under rapid development and deployment due to their potential to reduce the use of fossil fuel resources and to alleviate greenhouse gas emissions in the building sector – a sector which is responsible for ~40% of the world energy use. Absorption chiller technology (traditionally powered by natural gas in large buildings), can easily be retrofitted to run on solar energy. However, numerous non-intuitive design choices must be analyzed to achieve the best techno-economic performance of these systems.

Solar-assisted cooling technology has enormous potential for air-conditioning applications since both solar energy supply and cooling energy demand are well correlated. Unfortunately, market uptake of solar cooling technologies has been slow due to the high capital cost and limited design/operational experience. In the present work, different designs and operational modes for solar heating and cooling (SHC) absorption chiller systems are investigated and compared in order to identify the preferred design strategies for these systems.

The present work investigates the feasibility of solar heating and cooling (SHC) absorption systems based on combining three types of LiBr-H2O absorption chillers (single-, double-, and triple-effect) with common solar thermal collectors available on the market. A single-effect chiller is coupled with evacuated tube collectors (ETCs) – SHC1. A double-effect chiller is integrated with parabolic trough collectors (PTCs), linear Fresnel micro-concentrating collectors (MCTs) and evacuated flat plate collectors (EFPCs) respectively – SHC2, SHC3, and SHC4.

This paper presents energetic, economic, and environmental (3E) analyses of four configurations of solar heating and cooling (SHC) systems based on coupling evacuated tube collectors with a single-effect LiBre-H2O absorption chiller. In the first configuration (SHC1), a gas-fired heater is used as the back-up system, while a mechanical compression chiller is employed as the auxiliary cooling system in the second configuration (SHC2). The capacity of the absorption chiller is designed based on the maximum building cooling load in these configurations.

In this paper, a detailed simulation model of a solar-powered triple-effect LiBr–H2O absorption chiller is developed to supply both cooling and heating demand of a large-scale building, aiming to reduce the fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions in building sector. TRNSYS 17 is used to simulate the performance of the system over a typical year. A combined energetic-economic-environmental analysis is conducted to determine the system annual primary energy consumption and the total cost, which are considered as two conflicting objectives.

Solar heating and cooling (SHC) systems are currently under rapid development and deployment due to their potential to reduce fossil fuel use and to alleviate greenhouse gas emissions in the building sector – a sector which is responsible for ∼40% of the world energy use. The available technologies on the market for thermally driven cooling systems are absorption and adsorption chillers, solid and liquid desiccant cooling systems, and ejector refrigeration cycles.