Low Cost and Marketable Operational Experiences for a Solar Heating System with Seasonal Thermal Energy Storage (SHSSTES) in Hebei (China)

This paper introduces a seasonal thermal energy storage project which is the largest in Asia. In the project gross collector area is 11546m2 and capacity of the storage tank is 20381 tons. Several pilot solar heating systems with seasonal thermal energy storage (SHSSTES) built in Germany and North Europe since 1996 have been proven to provide stable performance and reliable high solar fraction. However due to construction cost and non-standard industrial manufacture. SHSSTES are not yet commercial prospects. In this project due to innovation in the solar collector system, water circulating system and tank design, the cost has fallen dramatically. Each part of the system has minimized cost without any compromise on performance. Also this project is a typical model of BOT (build-operate-transfer), with maximum benefit possible. This project is most likely to be commercially viable with payback period less than 6 years for this design. The influence of each part in the system is discussed through analysis of the data.