China

December 20, 2020
Assessing lighting quality in commercial buildings

How effective are integrated daylighting and electric lighting solutions in raising comfort and saving energy? To answer this question, a group of researchers working under the auspices of the IEA Solar Heating and Cooling Programme have taken a closer look at field studies of commercial...
September 25, 2020
World´s largest solar district heating plant with concentrating collectors

The Chinese parabolic trough collector manufacturer Inner Mongolia XuChen Energy has successfully operated a huge solar district heating plant since 2016 in a village near Baotou in Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of China. Yu Wang, General Manager of XuChen, said that there is...
July 21, 2020
Ups and downs in the 20 largest markets 2019

China again led the ranking for new installations of glazed and unglazed collectors – accounting for 73% of the total – followed by Turkey, India, Brazil and the United States. Additions in the largest solar heating and cooling markets besides China remained stable, with noteworthy growth...
July 13, 2020
Digital lighting controls improve user satisfaction

Designing energy-efficient lighting for offices and public buildings requires a deep understanding of user requirements. Although smart lighting solutions can lower electricity consumption significantly, building users want some sort of manual control for both light and window components....
June 22, 2020
Success factors in top SDH countries

In the last decade, Denmark, China, Germany and Austria played a leading role in the deployment of large solar thermal systems around the world. What country-specific factors helped these four achieve that level of market adoption and how support schemes and business models contributed to...
May 20, 2020
Lessons learned from first IEA SHC online meetings

“It worked very, very well and we saved a lot of emissions,” said one of the participants in the two-day online workshop organised by research platform Solar Neighborhood Planning, also known as Task 63. On 11 and 12 March, 42 people based in 10 different countries, ranging from Canada and...
May 4, 2020
Webinar on SHIP industry update & impact of Covid-19

On 14 May, Spanish-based renewable energy consultancy Ata Insights will be hosting a webinar to discuss how the industrial solar heat market developed in several regions in 2019 and in what way the current pandemic will most likely affect its short- and mid-term prospects. The consulting...
May 2, 2020
Where to look for the world’s most experienced SHIP suppliers

China and Mexico are the hubs of the global solar industrial heat (SHIP) supply industry. Five of the companies that completed the most SHIP projects by the end of 2019 are from China and four from Mexico; another two each are based in Germany and India (see chart above). These are the...
April 26, 2020
Industrial sector sees record-breaking capacity additions in 2019

In 2019, solar heat capacity additions reached record-breaking levels in industrial sectors around the world, coming to 251 MW in total. The countries at the top of the list were Oman (180 MW), China (53 MW), Mexico (3 MW), India (2 MW) and Germany (1 MW). Ranked by the number of new SHIP...
April 23, 2020
Italian-Chinese joint venture to build parabolic trough collector factory

Italian-based Trivelli Energia and Chinese-based Yaoguo have formed a joint venture with the aim of manufacturing Trivelli´s parabolic trough collectors in Tengzhou, China. The first contracts were signed at the beginning of 2019, and initial milestones were set at a kick-off meeting in...
March 25, 2020
Saga in Tibet tests solar heating in public buildings

Since November 2019, the southern Tibetan town of Saga has been home to the fourth solar district heating plant in the region after similar systems had already been installed in Langkazi,...
March 23, 2020
Demand for central solar water heating peaks in 2019

Linuo Paradigma, one of the largest solar thermal manufacturers in China, had very good sales of large hot water systems nationally last year. Together with local businesses, its engineering team for the national market designed and supervised as many as six projects that focused on...