Solar Heating and Cooling
Solar heating is the usage of solar energy to provide space or water heating. Worldwide the use was 88 GWthermal (2005). Growth potential is enormous. At present the EU is second after China in the installations. If all EU countries used solar thermal as enthusiastically as the Austrians, the EU’s installed capacity would already be 91 GWth (130 million m2 today, far beyond the target of 100 million m2 by 2010, set by the White Paper in 1997). In 2005 solar heating in the EU was equivalent to more than 686.000 tons of oil. ESTIF’s minimum target is to produce solar heating equivalent to 5.600.000 tons of oil (2020). A more ambitious, but feasible, target is 73 millions tons of oil per year (2020) – a lorry row spanning 1.5 times around the globe.
The research efforts and infrastructure needed to supply 50% of the energy for space and water heating and cooling across Europe using solar thermal energy has been set out under the aegis of the European Solar Thermal Technology Platform (ESTTP). Published in late December 2008, more than 100 experts developed the strategic research agenda (SRA), which includes a deployment roadmap showing the non-technological framework conditions that will enable this ambitious goal to be reached by 2050.
Read more about this topic: Renewable Energy In The European Union, Renewable Energy Sectors, Solar Energy
Famous quotes containing the words solar, heating and/or cooling:
“Senta: These boats, sir, what are they for?
Hamar: They are solar boats for Pharaoh to use after his death. They’re the means by which Pharaoh will journey across the skies with the sun, with the god Horus. Each day they will sail from east to west, and each night Pharaoh will return to the east by the river which runs underneath the earth.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)
“If the factory people outside the colleges live under the discipline of narrow means, the people inside live under almost every other kind of discipline except that of narrow means—from the fruity austerities of learning, through the iron rations of English gentlemanhood, down to the modest disadvantages of occupying cold stone buildings without central heating and having to cross two or three quadrangles to take a bath.”
—Margaret Halsey (b. 1910)
“As a bathtub lined with white porcelain,
When the hot water gives out or goes tepid,
So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion,
O my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)