Ecological Assessment of Solar Thermal Cooling Systems
Abstract
The environmental benefits of the use of renewable energy sources for cooling are widely known. As it is common practice this consideration usually only takes into account the driving energy source of the system. A complete and valid statement related to the environmental friendliness can only be obtained by taking into account the whole life cycle of the solar thermal cooling system. This paper presents a procedure to determine the assessment criteria amortisation time, yield ratio and savings on the basis of the global warming potential (GWP) and the cumulative primary energy demand (CED) of the system during its whole lifetime. As an example a typical solar thermal cooling system is compared to a conventional electrically and fossil fuel driven system by performing a life cycle assessment (LCA) on each of the systems. The obtained results and derived optimisation potential are discussed and recommendations for future work are given.