This document is the final report on activity A3 “System adaption”. The main parts are a description of a literature review on adapted systems to Sunbelt regions and a short summary on selected projects related to that.

The literature review focuses on adapted systems in solar cooling for Sunbelt regions. It outlines the methodology for conducting the review, including defining keywords, searching sources, preprocessing data, and coding information. The review aims to analyze qualitative data from various sources, utilizing Computer Assisted
Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS) like MAXQDA. The process involves steps such as working with word clouds, exploring full texts, highlighting important passages, and writing excerpts. After detailed data evaluation of 187 sources, the results will be synthesized and summarized for publication. Preliminary analysis shows trends in publication years (2012 followed by 2014 and 2020), types of references (mostly journal papers), titles, keywords (more than 500), and abstracts, providing insights into the state of the literature on solar cooling systems. Results of the literature review are presented as word clouds, showing the frequency of terms in different aspects of the literature, e.g., title or abstract.
 

This document is the final report on activity A5 “Standardization activities”. Activity A5 is dedicated to provide a comprehensive understanding of the significance of standardized actions and key performance indicators (KPIs) in driving advancements in the field of solar heating and cooling systems. Therefore, the importance of standardization in promoting interoperability, ensuring quality and fostering confidence among stakeholders was examined. In addition, the critical role of KPIs in assessing system performance, economic profitability and environmental impact were investigated.

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), warmsummer Mediterranean (Csb), humid subtropic (Cfa), monsoon-influenced humid subtropical (Cwa), hot summer humid continental climate zones.

This document is the final report on activity A4 “Building and process optimization” of the IEA SHC Task 65 “Solar Cooling for the Sunbelt regions”. It presents an overview on the relevance of building and process optimization..Several ongoing and completed projects are introduced and results are depicted. In particular, information about completed and running research projects are presented in order to quantify the amount of energy used for cooling systems. Furthermore, main projects related to the IEA EBC (Buildings and Communities Programme) about cooling.
systems are reported.
 

In general, climatic conditions and typical applications for (solar) cooling heavily depend on the location. In order to be able to deduce regionally specific requirements for solar cooling systems, it is therefore obvious to use geographical data. To process such data a Geographic information system (GIS) is needed. GIS are able to capture, store, check, and display data related to positions on Earth’s surface. Most geographical data relevant for this application are already available from various sources, such as solar radiation data, climatic data, population data etc.

In activity A1 a GIS software was used to combine geographic data in a way that local reference boundary conditions for solar cooling systems in the Sunbelt regions can be determined and also used for evaluation. The developed method can also be used to create information about possible locations and potentials of specific solar cooling systems. By additionally using for example population density and purchase power data a base for future market potential studies on certain products / technologies is provided. As a result potential sites can be identified as well as economic factors can be considered in order to identify (future) markets.

Many results from the ongoing research project “Solar thermal energy system for cooling and process heating in the sunbelt region – SBC” have been included into this Task. The project is carried out by two partners: Industrial Solar GmbH and the Bavarian Center for Applied Energy Research (ZAE Bayern). It was funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK) under the project number 03ETW026. The developed method was used to determine possible locations and potentials for the SBC system as a first example. It is planned to use the developed method in the further course of the task work.