ENERGETIC FEASIBILITY ANALYSIS OF LOW TEMPERATURE SOLAR THERMAL APPLICATIONS

Abstract

Owing to the dwindling supplies of conventional sources of energy, their rising cost and adverse impacts on the environment, the efforts towards developing new and renewable sources of energy have found impetus. The energetic feasibility criterion should necessarily be taken care of in the case of renewable energy technologies because there is no point in promoting a technology which consumes more energy in its production, installation ,operation and maintenance than it delivers in its entire lifetime. It is therefore quite important to undertake studies on energetic feasibility of renewable energy technologies. An attempt to analyze the energetic feasibility of low temperature solar thermal applications has been done in this work. The systems under consideration can be briefly classified as solar thermal system and solar PV system. Of all the other factors Embodied Energy , Energy Payback Time and Carbon Credit are mainly under consideration for this analysis. The systems under analysis are solar cooker, solar dryer ,solar collector, solar space and water heater, solar desalination, solar irrigation and hybrid solar collector respectively. It was found that as the size of system was increasing embodied energy was also increasing. Energy payback time was also dependant on the net output energy provided by the system apart from the embodied energy. Difference of net output energy and net input energy influenced the net carbon credit of a system.