China

April 7, 2021
Mixed performance of world's largest flat plate producers in COVID year 2020

Last year’s outbreak of Covid-19 around the globe reduced sales of most of the largest flat plate collector manufacturers not based in China. Only a small number of non-Chinese businesses saw an increase in sales, the result of a new support policy in Germany. Chinese flat plate collector...
March 4, 2021
China sees strong growth in demand for solar space heating

The Chinese solar thermal industry ended the pandemic year on a high note, as companies in the sector sold a total of 27.038 million m² (18.9 GW_th) of collector area throughout 2020, leading to a fairly low annual decline of only 5 % compared to 2019. Solar thermal...
February 27, 2021
PV-Thermal: Major markets and most sought-after technologies

IEA SHC Task 60, Application of PVT Collectors, shows how a fruitful collaboration between industry and research can lead to a thorough analysis of current and future technological developments. Besides developing a series of standardised key performance indicators to assess the...
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...