Where can I find skilled companies?
The SDH projects make available a Find Professionals Tool in Europe.
Where can I find both technical and regulation information about SDH plants, as well as details on built examples?
The SDHTO project makes available:
- analysis of built examples and of market conditions (WP2)
- a deep technical and regulation document (WP3)
- set of training slides (WP4)
- training courses in different countries
- workshop and meetings for experts
These can be downloaded at:
www.solar-district-heating.eu/Documents.aspx
Can solar thermal be combined with other heat sources in a district heating system?
Yes, the ST plant is very flexible and examples exist of combination with biomass, natural gas and CHP plants.
What are investment costs of SDH systems?
Investment costs of the system can be different from case to case. Cost of the collector array depends on the several conditions e.g. location, size of the system (ranging between 600 and 200 € per m²) and can be related to the solar heat gains in kWh per m².
Quotient of these values multiplied with an annuity factor gives the cost of the solar heat (Example: 300 €/m² and 400 kWh/m² and annuity factor 0.08 gives a price 0.06 €/kWh) Cost of the heat storage varies depending on the system design from very low if the collector array is connected directly to the district heating network without storage to about doubling the investment cost in € per m² when long term storage is used. An online calculation tool is available for free at:
www.solarkey.dk/f-easy/f-easy.xlsx
How much land do I need?
See question 5. The solar collectors can be installed either on the ground or on the roofs. For ground mounted collectors it takes normally 3-4 m² of land per m² collector installed to minimize shading.
What are operating costs of SDH systems?
The main part of the operating costs is connected to the electricity consumption and maintenance. These costs are about 1 € per MWh of produced heat. It is also necessary to consider insurance costs.