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PVPS
activities and products:
System
technlogies
The
second major section of work was on system technologies and
was aimed primarily at engineers and system designers.
Areas
of work included:
Building
integration techniques
www.pvdatabase.com
presents an overview of available system technologies today.
The database provides information concerning material, price,
dimensions and a system description. Drawings or pictures
give a closer view of the product.
Additionally,
two workshop reports addressing integration techniques are
available via the PVPS web site:
PV
in non-building structures
Photovoltaic
technology can be incorporated in Non-Building Structures
such as bus shelters, information signs, street lights and
sound barriers. The potential for using PV in Non-Building
Structures in the built environment is large, even in a modern
society where the electricity network is well developed. For
applications with a low power requirement PV can be suitable
as a commercial alternative to grid connection, avoiding the
need to dig up roads or pavements to lay cables.
Such
systems need to consider a range of criteria such as irradiation,
shading, orientation, visual impact, available surface and
other technical requirements. Past experience has also shown
that theft and vandalism can be a problem for the introduction
of PV in these kinds of applications.
A
PVPS
Task 7 report summarising the issues and presenting some
design strategies to facilitate the successful use of PV in
Non-Building Structures as well as a number of case studies,
can be downloaded from the main PVPS website.
Hybrid
PV/Thermal collector system
The
idea of combining photovoltaic systems with solar thermal
collectors has aroused interest over recent years. There are
a number of potential advantages to combining the two systems,
including the facts that:
- both
electricity and thermal energy are needed in most buildings
- five
times more heat than power is absorbed by PV-systems
- maximum
use can be made of the limited area normally available on
roofs and facades of buildings
- the
amount of collector material is reduced
- the
electric output of the PV system is increased if it is cooled
However
there are also a number of practical disadvantages and difficulties
to be overcome before these sorts of systems could be widely
used, for example the optimum operating temperature of a PV
system and a thermal system are normally different as are
the optimum collector areas.
A
limited amount of work on the topic of hybrid PV/thermal systems
was conducted during task 7, including the production of an
internal PV/T report with an inventory of known manufacturers
and a short description of the state of the art.
To
take this topic further a joint working group has been set
up between the two of the International Energy Agency's programmes
- PVPS and the Solar Heating and Cooling Programme. Further
information is available on the working group web site: www.pv-t.org
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