International Energy Agency’s Solar Heating and Cooling Programme
The IEA Solar Heating and Cooling (SHC) Programme has over 35 years of international collaborative work in the field of research, development, demonstration (RD&D) and test methods for solar thermal energy and solar buildings. The results of this work are available for researchers, policy makers, industry, utility and business representatives, builders, architects and teachers
The IEA SHC Programme is a member-based Programme with 20 member countries and 5 member organizations. Its mission is “To enhance collective knowledge and application of solar heating and cooling through international collaboration to fulfill its vision of solar thermal energy meeting 50% of low temperature heating and cooling demand by 2050.”
Highlighted in the section below are some of our most recent publications:
IEA SHC: New PVT System Enhancement Research
After seven years, the IEA Solar Heating and Cooling Programme (IEA SHC) is planning to launch another international research cooperation on PVT technology. PVT includes panels which combine photovoltaics and solar thermal into one unit either as glazed or unglazed systems. The first and only task on PVT systems was …
IEA Medium-Term Report: Solar Heating and Cooling Not on Track for 2 °C Scenario
The IEA’s Medium-Term Renewable Energy Market Report or MTRMR 2016 again includes a chapter on renewable heating and cooling – and it’s growing in size. The 282-page document published from Singapore on 25 October analyses on 47 pages the current and future market development of four renewable heating technologies: biomass, …
Global Solar Certification Network: Facilitating International High-Quality Collector Trade
The recent approval of Working Rules means that the Global Solar Certification Network (GSCN) can now accept membership applications. The reuse of test and inspection reports in different certification schemes will be possible at the beginning of 2017. The GSCN was developed in Task 43 of the IEA Solar Heating …
Qatar: Gulf Region’s Sustainability Experts Meet IEA’s Solar Heating and Cooling Specialists
About 400 industry stakeholders met in the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Doha in early November to attend the first Green Expo Forum organised by the Gulf Organisation for Research and Development (GORD). The three-day conference offered presentations by experts from Gulf countries and the IEA Solar Heating and Cooling Programme …
IEA SHC Task 56: “Facade-integrated HVAC components pose a Challenge for all parties involved”
The integration of solar facade solutions into the HVAC and lighting system of a building can only be successful if it is coordinated with architects and building engineers. A good forum to get in touch with architecture professionals is the annual Advanced Building Skins Conference (ABS) in Switzerland. The 2016 …
IEA SHC Task 46: Bankable Solar Data Sets for Concentrating Technologies
Whether investors put their money into large-scale concentrating solar heat and power systems, solar district heating plants or photovoltaic fields, they need to be able to rely on data sets to include the uncertainty and variability of input information. Financial institutions do like to know in what way these factors …
IEA SHC Task 51: German Summer School Educates Students on Solar Urban Planning
The summer school called City in Transition (Stadt im Wandel) ended with a public presentation of the project designs from four student groups on Monday, 26 September, in Berlin, Germany (see photo). During the previous week, students from different fields and German universities had developed a master plan for solar-optimised …
IEA SHC Task 50: Lighting Industry Explores Contracting Solutions
LED technology has greatly changed the face of the lighting market: In just a few years, lighting systems have become twice as efficient and half as expensive. These changes have resulted in a large but often untapped cost- and energy-saving potential in commercial buildings. The research in Task 50 of …
District heating: “The industry is very optimistic about its future prospects”
ct heating has a long history in Scandinavia: The international symposium on district heating was launched there in 1987. In the meantime, the technology has reached the global stage and the 15th International Symposium on District Heating and Cooling was the first one supported by the IEA District Heating and …
IEA SHC: Attractive Solar Solutions for Urban and Landscape Planning
How can urban planners be convinced to consider solar energy technologies in municipality projects? This is the key challenge faced by the international group of researchers of Task 51, Solar Energy in Urban Planning. One way to attract interest from these planners is to present them with case studies of …
IEA SHC: Cost Reduction Analysis Workshops at German University of Stuttgart
System cost reduction is one of the most urgent challenges of the solar thermal sector, especially in central Europe. The aim of Task 54 of the IEA Solar Heating and Cooling Programme, Price Reduction of Solar Thermal Systems, is to lower solar heat prices by up to 40 %. Germany’s …
IEA SHC: Coordinating Thermal Energy Storage Research Worldwide
The key to the decarbonisation of the energy sector is new compact storage technology: It will require much R&D to develop market-ready products based on new storage designs with phase change and thermochemical materials (PCMs and TCMs). One strategy is to combine resources within international research programmes – to create …
