IEA SHC Task 53 — Solar Heating & Cooling / Solar Air-Conditioning Position Paper

Source: IEA SHC Task 53 “New Generation Solar Cooling & Heating Systems (PV or solar thermally driven)”, position paper, Nov 2018 (Neyer, Mugnier, Thür, Fedrizzi, Vicente Quiles). Read in full from the PDF. Credibility: High (official IEA SHC TCP expert-consensus report). Confidence: high.

Key points

• The field is two market-ready architectures: (i) PV + vapor-compression machines, and (ii) solar-thermal + thermally-driven sorption chillers.
• PV is displacing thermal: “solar thermal cooling continued to face challenges… attributed to falling solar PV prices, which allowed cost-effective operation of vapor compression chillers powered by grid-connected solar inverters.” New market dynamism is “mainly boosted by PV driven systems.”
• Large Asian makers (Midea, Gree, Panasonic, LG) already integrate PV into heat pumps.
• Performance: best solar-cooling systems reach electrical SPF (kWh_th/kWh_el) of 20-40, cutting AC electricity demand >80% vs conventional HVAC.
• Economics: investment-dominated; solar-AC capex still 1.5-2.5x conventional. A ~30% capex cut would put solar-driven LCOE always below the reference. Amortization 8-15 yr (≈5 yr in favorable cases). PV systems are “predestined” to scale cheaply with chillers/heat pumps.
• Thermal’s surviving niche: solar-thermal stays “more competitive” where it simultaneously supplies DHW (low-temp) and cooling (high-temp), especially moderate climates with easy thermal storage.

Relevance

The spine of the “is there a better option for solar thermal cooling?” question: the authoritative statement that cheap PV has made PV-driven cooling the ascendant architecture, with the qualitative reasons and SPF/cost numbers. See solar-cooling-pv-vs-thermal.