Sidite Solar, Solar Water Heater, Solar Collector, Solar Panels

2018年4月17日星期二

INDIA: COLLECTOR MARKET NO LONGER DEPENDS ON SUBSIDIES

The Indian solar thermal market is gradually becoming self-sustaining, as fiscal year 2016 showed renewed signs of growth after the suspension of the national grant scheme in 2014. Overall, the glazed collector market grew by 6 % to 1.28 million m² (894 MWth). Another 6,250 m² were installed for use in concentrating collector systems. This figure was not added to the glazed total, but is shown in the chart. The market numbers for 2016 were provided by Indian consultant Jaideep Malaviya, who based his analysis on the import statistics of vacuum tubes and a survey among the few flat plate collector manufacturers still in business in the country today.
(*) The bar for 2016 refers to numbers from the calendar year 2016, as the country’s Central Board of Excise and Customs has not yet published data for January–March 2017. All other bars in the graph refer to figures from the respective fiscal year, which in India runs between 1 April and 31 March the following year.

Source: Jaideep Malaviya

The import statistics by Legumex Impex (www.zauba.com) show that India imported 4,296,571 vacuum tubes for low-temperature applications under five HS codes (84191920, 84199010, 84191110, 84199090 and 84191910) between January and December 2016. A new standard called All Glass Evacuated Tubes Solar Water Heating System has the average tube size at 0.244 m² for the most common type of tube imported to India (58 * 1800 mm²). Consequently, the total tube absorber area imported to the country was around 1.05 million m².

In the previous fiscal year of 2015, the Legumex statistics registered imports of 425,000 tubes or an average absorber area of 1.03 million m² when multiplied with the standard factor.

The share of imported vacuum tubes in the newly installed collector area in 2016 grew to 88 % (up from 82 % in 2015). The newly installed flat plate collector area added up to 0.15 million m² (down from 0.22 million m² in 2015).

The concentrating collector area installed each year peaked in 2015/2016 at 21,500 m² (black bar in the chart) due to a federal programme with which the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) covered 30 % of system costs. In 2016, however, there were only 6,250 m² of new concentrating collectors, which has made room in the market vacuum tube systems with aluminium mirrors (called compound parabolic concentrators = CPC), which are increasingly used in industrial processes.

Last year was the first time that Legumex showed this technology as a separate category. In 2016 India imported 403,909 vacuum tubes with CPC under three HS codes 84191910, 8419910, 84199090 with a typical size of 1,800 * 58 mm². Using the average CPC tube area factor of 0.19 m²/tube set by MNRE, this results in 76,743 m² which is included in the chart above as vacuum tube collector area. In vacuum tube collectors with CPC mirrors the space between the tubes is smaller than in panels without aluminium mirrors, this is why the area per tube is smaller in this tube category. Use of vacuum tubes with CPCs to provide hot water of up to 90 °C has been on the rise in commercial application and several industries, such as automotive, chemical, dairy, food processing and pharmaceutical.

India’s national industry association, Solar Thermal Federation of India (STFI), continues to try and direct the government’s attention to the alarming rise in imports of solar thermal components and systems with no checks on quality. Unless the government intervenes by establishing stringent and mandatory standards, India may soon become a haven for sub-standard vacuum tubes, which will lead to a decline in customer confidence, STFI emphasised.

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SIDITE Solar:
China Manufacturer;
Solar Water Heater, Solar Collector;

Zhejiang Sidite New Energy Co.,Ltd.

China manufacturer, Solar water heater, solar hot water, solar hot water heater, solar water heater system, heat pipe solar water heater, pressured solar water heater, flat panel solar water heater, solar collector, solar thermal collector, vacuum tube solar collector, evacuated tube solar collector, solar panels.

Web: www.chinasidite.com
Tel: 0086-573-83224422 / 83225522
Fax: 0086-573-83225533
E-mail: sdt01@sidite.com

NETHERLANDS: SOLAR THERMAL BENEFITS FROM SDE+ SOLAR HEAT TARIFF

In the Netherlands, solar district heating plants with a capacity of 140 kWth or above can benefit from a feed-in tariff scheme called SDE+, which pays a certain amount per kWh of energy. Under the scheme, operators of renewable energy plants can apply for a subsidy to bridge the gap between market price and cost of energy production. Consequently, interest was high when a workshop about solar district heating (SDH) took place in mid-April 2017. It attracted around 50 people from the district heating and the solar thermal industry, consulting businesses and the government. Organised jointly by Dutch district heating organisation Warmtenetwerk, Holland Solar and the Netherlands Enterprise Agency, RVO.nl, the workshop featured a presentation on SDH in Denmark – held by Jan Erik Nielsen from PlanEnergi and based on results from Task 45 and 55 of the IEA Solar Heating and Cooling Programme – and provided information about the national subsidy scheme, thermal storage technologies as well as the only DH plant in operation in the Netherlands to date.

Photo: Netherlands Enterprise Agency

The need for highly competitive designs meant that solar thermal had not had much of a chance within the SDE+ programme until the end of 2015. Most of the scheme budget used to be spent on biomass, geothermal and on-shore wind projects. In 2016, the average market price of solar heat fell (widening the gap to be bridged by subsidies), SDE+ funding was increased and biomass co-firing in coal power plants was dropped from the list of eligible technologies, which has greatly improved the chances of solar thermal. Last year, the most important competitor of solar heat was PV. Spring of 2017 marked the application round for PV plants at a base amount of 12.5 EUR cent/kWh (solar thermal: 9.5 EUR cent/kWh), so they rank after solar thermal if the budget gets tighter.

In 2016, SDE+ approved funding for around 62 MWth in solar thermal plants. Many applications were about heating systems for orchid greenhouses, where the collectors come from Dutch importer Zonneboilerpro. The first of these systems is now under construction. Lex Bosselaar, who works at RVO.nl and used to represent the Netherlands within the IEA Solar Heating and Cooling Program, views this first system as critical for others that could follow: “The development of this new market will depend a lot on the performance of the first systems,” he said. Not all projects for which funding has been approved will be realised. The SDE+ budget is financed by a levy on electricity prices. If there are funds left from a not realised project, they will be made available for other projects or used to reduce the charge added to electricity costs.

Stakeholders of the district heating market have been the second group besides agricultural businesses to take a closer look at solar thermal energy use in the Netherlands. The subsidy amount of 6.6 EUR cent/kWh could make SDH a very attractive option for district heating companies (see the calculation model below). “The solar plants themselves could be built in the Netherlands at costs similar to those in Denmark. The key factor will be the price of land – which might be higher here,” said Bosselaar. He expects that energy producers and system suppliers will start making efforts to identify suitable applications for solar heat, so more markets can emerge.

2017 budget enough for first solar thermal application round

The SDE+ programme is said to have two application rounds in 2017. The first from 7 to 30 March saw applications for 27 solar thermal projects totalling 26 MWth. Expectations are that most funding requests will be approved, as the amount asked for in these applications was only slightly above the budget available.

Competition among renewable technologies is an integral part of the SDE+ concept: There is only one budget for all types of renewable energies.

There has also been a maximum tariff specified for each technology to reflect differences in the cost of production. In the case of solar heat, it was 9.5 EUR cent/kWh during the application period in spring 2017. Producers of solar heat can freely choose a tariff amount on their application, as long as it does not exceed the maximum for their technology.

However, the incentives are only meant to bridge the gap between market and production price, not to pay for all costs associated with renewable energy generation. A “correction amount” is applied to take into account the market price of the energy produced. It was set to 2.9 EUR cent/kWh of solar heat in spring 2017 and will be adjusted if the situation on the market changes.

Based on currently available figures, producers of solar heat can expect an incentive of, at most, 6.6 EUR cent/kWh. Full-load hours of solar thermal plants are capped at 700 per year, which means a maximum annual subsidy of EUR 6,468 at 140 kWth of capacity. The subsidy is paid over no more than 15 years. One year after the project application has been approved, the energy producer must submit documents detailing the planned installation, for example, which components will be part of it and what the construction contracts look like. The plant must then be up and running in three years’ time and the energy producer must register with certification body Cert iQ and be listed by a metering company as a producer of renewable heat. After meeting these requirements, a monthly instalment will be paid in advance. The correction amount will be adjusted annually based on certified metering data and the actual energy price.

This text was written by Eva Augsten, a German freelance journalist specialising in renewable energies.

Websites of organisations and projects mentioned in this article:

Warmtenetwerk (Dutch only): warmtenetwerk.nl/

Zonneboilerpro: http://www.zonneboilerpro.nl/

Presentations from the district heating workshop (some in Dutch, some in English) http://warmtenetwerk.nl/home/nieuws/nieuwe-news-page-46/

SDE+ scheme: http://english.rvo.nl/subsidies-programmes/sde

IEA SHC Task 55 on solar district heating: http://task55.iea-shc.org/

http://www.sidite-solar.com/category_3_Splitsolarwaterheater.html

SIDITE Solar:
China Manufacturer;
Solar Water Heater, Solar Collector;

Zhejiang Sidite New Energy Co.,Ltd.

GERMANY: PROCESS HEAT SUPPLY FROM VACUUM TUBES AND AIR COLLECTORS ON THE RISE

There is a distinct difference between the make-up of the German solar process heat segment and the country’s solar thermal market in general and it concerns the type of collectors used. One in four collectors used in solar process heat systems is an air collector, although the technology contributes only around 10 % to the total collector area newly installed each year. The same has been true for vacuum tube systems, which showed a 35 % share in solar process heat installations among approved projects in 2016 – despite an overall market share of only 9 % last year. All figures are based on statistics provided by the University of Kassel’s Institute of Thermal Engineering, which has been in charge of the research accompanying the subsidy scheme on solar process heat under the auspices of Germany’s Market Rebate Programme for Renewable Energies or MAP.

Chart: solrico, source: Institute of Thermal Engineering, University of Kassel

MAP support for process heat began five years ago with the launch of a scheme that has been granting the same incentive amount regardless of the type of collector (flat plate, vacuum tube or air) being installed. Currently, there is no cap on the collector field size and subsidy amount. The scheme allows investors to choose among three different models. They can ask for a low-interest loan from the German KfW bank, which will be combined with a non-repayable grant of 50 % on the net investment. End customers with the financial means available can also apply directly for a 50 % subsidy of the eligible net investment at the Federal Office for Economic Affairs and Export Control, BAFA. And third option is to request a performance-based incentive, which will take into account the annual yield shown on the corresponding Solar Keymark certificate. If the latter model is more beneficial than the 50 % rule, BAFA will recommend it to the applicant.

Despite the high subsidy amount, the collector area of approved applications had decreased since the peak year of 2014, mostly because of low oil and gas prices over the last years, said Reiner Warsinski from BAFA. Germany also had few solar process heat planners available to promote the programme among manufacturing businesses.

The biggest two new KfW-supported projects from 2016 were a Ritter XL system with 600 m² of vacuum tube collectors and CPCs (compound parabolic concentrators) for a car wash and a 420 m² flat plate collector installation for a gas pressure regulating system. The latter was planned and set up based on a turnkey delivery contract by German Enertracting. The solar-powered car wash has already been the fifth of its kind installed on behalf of the Mr Wash chain. “Our solar-powered car washes are very cost-effective thanks to the water-based AquaSystem technology developed in-house,” explained Dr Rolf Meißner, Managing Director of Ritter XL.

A recently published ranking based on the survey results of the World Map of Solar Process Heat Specialists 2017 places his company among the largest turnkey solar process heat planners from around the globe. Ritter XL has completed 29 turnkey solar process heat installations and is the only German business in a list dominated by Mexican and Indian system suppliers. For more information about the world map survey, please see the attached brochure Solar Heat for Industry.

Largest turnkey SHIP suppliers based on no. of reference projects

The largest new installation supported by BAFA subsidies was a 360 m² air collector system by German collector manufacturer Grammer Solar. It provides the heat required for drying hay on an eco-friendly cattle farm in Hohenwarth, southern Germany (see the photo below). Air volume is at 10,000 to 35,000 m³ per hour, and the system is backed up by a wood-chip boiler.

360 m² of glazed air collectors for drying hay at an eco-farm in southern Germany

Photo: Grammer

“Since MAP’s solar process heat subsidy scheme – including support for air drying – was launched in 2012, we have realised several solar projects for drying agricultural products, for example, hay and or wood chips,” confirmed Rudolf Ettl, who heads the solar air heating division of Grammer. The advantage of air heating systems is their simplicity compared to water-driven collector fields, as they do not require tanks, expansion vessels or pumps, only fans. “The growth in demand has helped reduce system costs,” said Ettl. Whereas specific system costs were still at 600 EUR/m²a at the start of the subsidy scheme, Grammer is now at around 450 EUR/m². Ettl, however, pointed out that the low oil price had created a difficult sales environment during the last two years.

Websites of organisations mentioned in this article:

http://www.bafa.de/

http://grammer-solar.com/de/

http://ritter-xl-solar.com/

http://www.enertracting.de/

http://www.solar.uni-kassel.de/

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SIDITE Solar:
China Manufacturer;
Solar Water Heater, Solar Collector;

Zhejiang Sidite New Energy Co.,Ltd.

SUNPOWER COMPLETES MASSIVE PARKING STRUCTURE SOLAR INSTALLATION IN TEXAS

They say that everything is bigger in Texas. while this is true for the wide open prairies 72-oz. steaks, apparently it is true for solar as well. Because when Toyota decided to do solar at their new North American headquarters, they weren’t thinking small.

Today SunPower announced that it has completed a massive PV system comprising 20,000 of the company’s E-Series modules mounted atop four parking garages at Toyota Motor North America’s new headquarters in Plano, Texas. The E-Series PV modules offer around 20% average conversion efficiency, as some of the most powerful PV modules commercially available.

The 8.8 MW plant is expected generate enough electricity to meet around 33% of the dem at Toyota’s headquarters, Toyota will buy the power from SunPower through a long-term power contract. The installation will additionally help Toyota to meet its LEED Platinum goal for the facility.

The plant in Plano is one of the largest commercial solar installations in Texas, the fourth that SunPower has built for Toyota. This goes all the way back to a solar array SunPower installed for Toyota in Southern California in 2003.

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SIDITE Solar:
China Manufacturer;
Solar Water Heater, Solar Collector;

Zhejiang Sidite New Energy Co.,Ltd.

FIRST COOLING INSTALLATION ON INDIAN GOVERNMENT BUILDING

Gujarat State Electricity Corporation set up a solar thermal air conditioning system as part of its clean energy initiative last August. The installation offers a capacity of 150 tons of refrigeration (528 kW) to cool the Gandhinagar Thermal Power Station’s office building in Gujarat state in western India. The total investment, including the collector field, mounting equipment, chiller and hot water storage tanks, amounted to Indian Rupee (INR) 52 million, or around EUR 0.7 million, which corresponds to specific costs of 1,327 EUR/kW.

Photo: VSM Solar

The project received INR 16 million in federal subsidies and is expected to pay off over 6 years. The office building in need of cooling has 2,000 m² of floor space. Gujarat State Electricity Corporation Limited, or GSECL, said that the installation saved 250 MWh of electricity per year. It is connected to the existing cooling plant, powered by electric compression chillers.

The solar cooling system comprises 525 vacuum tube collectors with CPC (Compound Parabolic Concentrators) which have an aperture area of 3 m² each, bringing the total up to 1,575 m². Owing to space constraints, 131 collectors were installed on a terrace, while the remaining units were set up on the ground. The system supplies hot water at 90 °C to a new vapour absorption machine. In summer, this machine can lower the water temperature to 7 °C. The entire installation was delivered by German-Indian joint venture VSM Solar, headquartered in Bengaluru, the capital of Karnataka state in southern India.

The chilled water from the vapour absorption machine circulates through three air handling units, which are part of the existing system and supply conditioned air to the building. Buffer tanks help store solar-heated water on non-working days to offer even more comfort the next day. Backup electrical heaters ensure that the thermal-driven absorption chiller operates the entire time, even when the sun is not shining.

Bela Jani, Executive Engineer at GSECL, told officials from the Solar Energy Corporation of India during an inspection visit that the company saw solar thermal as a promising solution for heating and cooling. “Air conditioning made up a major proportion of our electricity expenses, so we researched some more and visited several solar thermal cooling plants which have already been put into operation,” Jani said. Ultimately, GSECL started to invite tenders and awarded a contract to VSM Solar to supply and install the system. The engineer said that it had been the first-ever solar thermal cooling installation on a government building in India.

VSM Solar is a joint venture formed in 2011 between Indian-based VSM Energy and German research institute Fraunhofer, which owns a 25 % stake in the company. The aim of VSM is to design, manufacture and install solutions for solar air conditioning, refrigeration, cold storage and other applications in India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

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SIDITE Solar:
China Manufacturer;
Solar Water Heater, Solar Collector;

Zhejiang Sidite New Energy Co.,Ltd.

IEA SHC WEBINAR: COST REDUCTION POTENTIAL ABOVE 30 %

The key takeaway from an IEA SHC Solar Academy webinar held on 14 March 2018: There is still much room for cost cuts along the entire solar thermal value chain. The webinar was organised jointly by the IEA Solar Heating & Cooling Programme’s Task 54 and the International Solar Energy Society.

Chart: Aventa

The online seminar, titled Price Reduction of Solar Thermal Systems, was moderated by Sandrin Saile, Project Manager at Fraunhofer ISE, based in Germany. Its aim was to present the various ways in which the cost of solar thermal plants could be lowered to stop the bleeding on the market and give the technology a competitive edge over other thermal energy sources, such as biomass and heat pumps.

In his presentation, Yoann Louvet, PhD student at the University of Kassel, Germany, said that Task 54 calculations of solar thermal costs were based on the LCOH, the levelised cost of heat, an indicator originating in the power sector. The LCOH is the ratio of total costs, i.e., investment and O&M expenses, of a specific system to the number of solar-based kilowatt-hours expected to be produced over its lifetime. The attached Task 54 fact sheet describes in detail what the LCOH calculation entails.

Equation for the levelised cost of heat, or LCOH. The reference energy value, or Et, represents the number of kilowatt-hours that a given reference system produces each year.

Source: Yoann Louvet, University of Kassel, Task 54

Since Task 54 focuses on the residential market, one basic assumption was a discount rate of 0 %, as the solar thermal systems installed in this sector are usually paid in full when the purchase is made. It was also assumed that there would be no VAT to pay. To produce reliable estimates of cost reduction potential, Task 54 members chose 10 reference systems from 5 countries. The one in Germany was a 5 m² flat plate installation, including 300 litres of storage, for a single-family home. This sort of system has an LCOH of 13.9 EUR ct/kWh over a 20-year lifetime.

Combing through the entire value chain

The key message by Stephan Fischer from the German Institute of Thermodynamics and Thermal Engineering, University of Stuttgart, was that cost reduction potential can be found at every stage of the solar thermal value chain. Fischer talked about the vital role of standardisation, of which there was a lack in today’s solar thermal industry. He said that not only did collectors vary greatly in size, but that there was also a diverse range of mounting systems and temperature sensors might be attached to entirely different parts of an installation. Increasingly standardised system components, on the other hand, could reduce costs along the entire value chain (see table 1).

Part of the value chain	Benefits of standardisation
Planning	Needs less preparation and consultancy work
Production	Mass production will result in less expensive components and logistics
Distribution	Offers easier packaging, storage and transport
Installation	Guarantees faster and error-free installation
Operation	Higher performance will increase energy savings and extend system life
Maintenance	Requires less upkeep

Table 1: Benefits of standardisation along the value chain

Source: Stephan Fischer, ITW, Task 54

Fischer’s estimate for the German reference system described above put the LCOH at 9.8 EUR ct/kWh, a cost reduction of about 30 % (see table 2).

	Baseline	Reduction	Result
Investment – components (EUR)	2,600	-10 %	2,340
Investment – installation (EUR)	1,250	-20 %	1,000
O&M costs (EUR/year)	117	-26 %	87
Final energy saved (kWh/year)	2,226	+10 %	2,449
Service time (years)	20	+10 %	22

Table 2: Cost reduction potential for German reference installation

Source: Stephan Fischer, ITW, Task 54

New materials

Michaela Meir, Head of R&D at Aventa AS, a company specialising in the manufacture of polymer collectors, explained how simplified production could help reduce costs. Polymer collectors had the potential for significant cost savings, as they required fewer steps to be produced. First, their extruded absorbers are cut to the right length. Then, the end caps are added to the absorber via infrared welding before the entire component is coated. She said that the collectors were also lighter and easier to handle, which lowered the cost of installation. Meir showed three real-world examples of medium-scale solar plants whose LCOH was between 3.5 and 9.9 EUR ct/kWh.

Size matters

Making increased use of solar thermal for multi-family property rather than for single-family buildings could also contribute to reducing costs, as François Veynandt, Researcher at Austrian Institute AEE INTEC, noted. Apart from being bigger, the systems could be integrated more easily with other technologies such as heat pumps or photovoltaic units, the latter in the form of PVT collectors. Likewise, they could activate a building’s thermal mass and offer the chance for centralised storage which provides space heating.

Veynandt mentioned some sample calculations for solar thermal installations at multi-family buildings. In the case of Austria and France, they had resulted in an LCOH of 6 and 6.7 EUR ct/kWh compared to 12.5 and 10.5 EUR ct/kWh for a single-family building, which is a reduction of 52 % and 36 % respectively.

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SIDITE Solar:
China Manufacturer;
Solar Water Heater, Solar Collector;

Zhejiang Sidite New Energy Co.,Ltd.

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