12.2. How to Identify a Good Market for STE

When determining which types of STE systems are best for a certain area or application, several key pieces of information need to be identified:

• The temperature of targeted application
• The solar resource at the given locale
• Schedule for the required energy use.

With these three pieces of information, the system selection can be made relatively straightforward. Once the system types are known, the capital and operating costs can be evaluated and compared with alternative (conventional) fuel system costs.

To determine a required temperature, you may need to do some research on similar systems or to contact the facility management directly.

To assess the solar resource, there are a handful of tools available for free that can provide solar radiation information at varying levels of detail depending on your location. The most widely used meteorological information is a Typical Meteorological Year (TMY) file, which contains solar radiation data. While the TMY data does not contain inter-annual extremes, it does capture typical seasonal variation, which should be sufficient for any first level market assessment. TMY data is available for the whole world from the EnergyPlus website but is formatted for EnergyPlus. The data can be extracted manually using a spreadsheet or script but is not readily available on the web. Historical actual meteorological data, containing seasonal variations from year to year, can be obtained for the U.S. from solaranywhere.com. Basic solar resource information for Africa, Asia, and Europe can be obtained from PVGIS.

To assess the load schedule for a given solar thermal application, the existing schedule, requirements, seasonal and daily variations, and overall flexibility of the process need to be explored. This requires good understanding and some research on the targeted process. 

The following table matches some applications with solar thermals technologies implemented. The data contained in the table are from Chapter 16 of Power From the Sun.