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:
Solar Award recognizes outstanding solar thermal installation for process heating or cooling
The IEA SHC Programme has just launched the call for nominations for the Solar Award 2024. This year the programme will recognize an outstanding project or programme that has reduced costs and environmental impact by providing solar thermal heating or cooling to an industrial process or several processes. The nomination …
Commercially available products and champions of PCMs and TCMs
The Compact Thermal Energy Storage group within the IEA Solar Heating and Cooling programme investigates new materials for storing heat and develops standard procedures to test their stability, heat capacity etc. This is important basic research in order to find storage materials for new applications. During the Solar Academy webinar …
Interdisciplinary author team answers ten questions concerning planning and design strategies for solar neighborhoods
10 key questions, 12 authors and two years of drafting time led to a comprehensive paper on planning and design strategies for solar neighborhoods, which has just been published by the journal Building and Environment. The initiative originated from Associate Professor Maria Wall, who heads IEA SHC Task 63 on …
IEA SHC Solar Academy training in Cape Verde with high visibility
The IEA Solar Heating and Cooling Programme pursues a multidimensional approach to support the market transformation of solar cooling. This includes training for entrepreneurs from the installation industry and energy experts from administration at a national level. The photo shows solar cooling expert Dr Uli Jakob during a two-day specialized …
Technical tour to Europe’s largest solar industrial heat plant at Heineken Spain
The inauguration of the 30 MW parabolic trough plant at the Heineken factory in Seville, Spain, on 30 September 2023 was exactly on time. The investor and plant operator Engie España had to put the plant into operation before the end of September in order to receive the extensive subsidy …
“There is high potential for using solar energy in wastewater treatment”
In a circular economy the efficient supply of carbon-free energy and the recovery of resources as well as the treatment of wastewater must go hand in hand. In the IEA SHC Task 62 on Solar Energy in Industrial Water & Wastewater Management more than 50 experts worked intensively together to …
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, …
