Hybrid solar system for heat and electric demands in a simple housing within Sweden and China

Abstract: The access to ideal heating and power techniques has always been highly thought after.This is mainly due to the development in housing architecture and the cold nature of certain regions which has led to an increase in popularity of the heating market and modernised heating technologies. The current DH systems make use of CHP plants for thegeneration of power and electricity. These CHP plants for the most part, are powered through biomass and during winter periods the demand for heating is highly increased.The biggest issue with relying on biomass solely is the constant need to burn wasteproducts which not only results in increasing the demand for consuming in more waste,but also results in producing remains (by-products) that cannot be broken down further and hence might require the utilization of land-space (landfills) for their disposal. Solar modules on the other hand, have gained increased popularity in the recent age. This is mainly due their extremely high flexible ability in converting solar irradiance intoelectrical and thermal energies. This study will try to provide a comprehensive study intothe utilization of a hybrid solar system that combines a standard PV module with a flat-plate collector through estimating the energy demands for a simple housing within Sweden and China. This will be the main aim of the study, however the possibilities of integrating this hybrid solar system alongside current DH systems will mostly be discussed in the first sections to proof the possibility of executing such a system. The theoretical work carried out will only include simulations of having just separate,standalone PV and flat-plate collector modules. However, designing a hybrid solar and DH system will not be the major focus of this study. The results at the end of the report,concluded that the electrical production for the Swedish case were noticeably higher thanthat of the Chinese case in spite of maintaining the same load values through both cases and higher solar irradiation for the Chinese case. Due to PVsyst simulation constraints,the results show that the investment cost of the Swedish PV (electrical component) module was about 3.6 times greater than that of the Chinese which could possibly mean that the Swedish case has a bigger PV module area than the Chinese case in order to meetel ectricity demand monthly. However, when it came to the thermal energy production, it was possible to assume different collectors cases and hence an area of 7m2 was chosen for the Swedish perspective while an area of 4m2 has been considered for the Chinese case. The thermal useful energy values where then compared with heating demands for both of the cases. Finally, the thesis concluded that there was no requirement for having an integrated DH network within the standalone houses, having small electricity and heat demand and hence, it might be more beneficial to have an integrated DH and solar system within more densely populated housing areas.