Techno-economic evaluation of hybrid solar thermal and photovoltaic cooling systems in the industrial sector implementing a dynamic load estimation method

Abstract

Hybrid solar cooling systems (HYBS) that combine air-to-water and absorption chillers driven by photovoltaic and solar thermal collector fields could improve the techno-economic performance of renewable cooling technologies in industrial applications. However, the limited access to dynamic cooling load data is a notable barrier to evaluating these systems. This research evaluates and compares the techno-economic performance of HYBS with conventional solar and fossil-powered alternatives. For this purpose, a dynamic cooling load profile method for the winemaking industry based on the conduction time series and the heat balance methods was developed, which only requires meteorological data and the annual volume of wine production. The HYBS were evaluated considering Chilean wine regions (high, medium and low solar radiation). The results showed that the HYBS could achieve the highest solar fraction values in all evaluated scenarios. Moreover, HYBS reaches a reduction of 7% of the levelized cost of heating and cooling in medium and low solar radiation sceneries, and the economic performance is highly influenced by the local cost of fossil energy. This research contributes to identifying the potential of HYBS in the industry and presents a useful method to generate dynamic cooling loads from commonly available data.