Renewable energy solutions for building cooling, heating and power system installed in an institutional building: Case study in southern Spain

In the last few years the solar-assisted air-conditioning systems have been in intensive development and are considered as the viable application for the thermal solar systems more often, especially in regions of southern Europe. This is driven by the increasing higher electrical consumption in many countries (especially in Spain) during the summer months due to expanding usage of cooling systems. Another important aspect to consider is that the traditional cooling systems require additional power consumption and studies have shown that the refrigerants used in those systems cause ozone layer depletion and greenhouse effect. This paper presents and compares different building cooling, heating and power systems (BCHP) based on renewable energy sources with the conventional BCHP system. The main goal here is to find a more favourable, design for Solar Energy Research Center (CIESOL) from environmental and energy management perspective. The further comparison versus the reference system (conventional BCHP) is made between the three possible technologies. Hence we investigate here the solar absorption BCHP system and two other solutions: solar geothermal electric compression BCHP and solar electric compression BCHP system. We used the primary energy and CO2 savings, initial cost, operating cost, maintenance cost, avoided costs and payback period as key performance indicators (KPIs). The energy performance of solar-assisted BCHP systems has been assessed considering as a benchmark the entire energy infrastructure operating today in the CIESOL building situated on the Campus of the University of Almeria. The results of the comparison demonstrated that only the solar absorption BCHP system presents energy saving potential. During 1 year it uses 61% less primary energy than the conventional BCHP system and is technically and economically feasible. At the same time, we used solar resource, abundant in the Almerيa region, in an efficient way, making CIESOL building consumption less energy intensive and ensuring environmental protection.