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:
Demo projects of high-solar-fraction buildings carefully analysed
The IEA Solar Heating and Cooling Programme addresses the question of what is needed to reach a high degree of self-sufficiency in solar energy buildings and blocks. A research group within the IEA SHC Task 66 on Solar Energy Buildings has identified 20 completed or planned mostly residential building projects …
Open data sets have great importance when analysing and optimising operation strategies for solar district heating plants
A complete annual data set of monitoring results for a solar district heating plant is an important prerequisite for meaningful simulations of such systems and for developing of monitoring algorithms. That is why the scientists working on IEA SHC Task 68 on Efficient Solar District Heating are committed to ensuring …
Tests of solar water heaters in China aim at improving standards
More than a third of the newly installed collector area in 2021 globally was thermosiphon systems. They dominate sales in many Asian and Latin American countries. The IEA Solar Heating and Cooling Programme’s Task 69, “Solar Hot Water for 2030” is investigating performance and failure modes to provide the technology …
Carbon footprint assessment of various types of solar water heater
The Johannes Kepler University Linz (JKU) wants to support the IEA Solar Heating and Cooling Programme with life cycle analysis of solar water heaters. During the last meeting of IEA SHC Task 69 on Solar Hot Water for 2030 in April 2023 Harald Kicker from the Institute of Polymeric Materials …
Solar thermal achieves highest level of “real” climate neutrality
The term “climate neutral” is omnipresent today. But there is no generally accepted official definition of climate neutrality. Instead there are three definitions that have different impacts on the assessment of residential solar-energy-based systems. Harald Drück, Chair of IEA SHC Task 66 Solar Energy Buildings, calls these three approaches: virtual, …
Deep insights into solar market development on the global, national and sector-specific levels
Solar Heat Worldwide 2023 reports mixed growth for solar thermal. While solar thermal markets grew, particularly in Europe, the global market was overshadowed by declines in the two largest markets, China and India. As a result, the global new solar heat capacity in 2022 contracted by 9.3% compared to 2021, …
“Solar thermal is uniquely positioned to support low-carbon economies”
Dr Lucio Mesquita from Natural Resources Canada will chair the IEA Solar Heating and Cooling Programme (IEA SHC) for the next two years. He was elected during an Executive Committee meeting in June in France (see photo). Mesquita (marked with the red arrow on the photo) already supported the former …
Cost reduction potential through prefabricated and standardized balance of plants
Standardized, modular interfaces for the integration of solar heat into factories can reduce solar heat system costs significantly. The photo shows such a prefabricated so-called balance of plant (BoP) before being shipped to Turnhout in Belgium to connect a 2.5 MW parabolic trough collector field with a chemical factory. The …
Solar district heating info package for cities and towns
Among the 6,000 cities and towns in Europe with district heating, 266 already feed solar heat into their grid. For municipalities that plan to expand and develop new district heating systems to reduce their dependency on fossil fuels the IEA SHC Task 68 team has developed a solar district heating …
Innovations in the front-running solar district heating country Denmark
The Danish solar district heating sector is a role model for the world. Researchers from IEA SHC Task 68 Efficient Solar District Heating met in the Danish capital Copenhagen for a project meeting and visited two innovative solar district heating examples. he first visit was to the concentrating solar heat …
Spotlight on the South African solar thermal market
Over the last decade the South African solar thermal market has stagnated at around 140,000 m2 of newly installed collector area annually. On the one hand, South Africa is the largest national solar thermal market on the African continent. On the other hand, this is a surprisingly low volume in …
IEA SHC recommends conversion factor 0.7 kWth/m2 for statistics on concentrating collectors
The IEA Solar Heating and Cooling Programme (IEA SHC) recommends the factor of 0.7 kWth per square metre of aperture collector area for the conversion of area to power for statistics on concentrating collectors. This is an important step for international market statistics about new solar heat capacities. So far, …
