Dynamic simulation of a solar heating and cooling system for an office building located in Southern Italy

The paper investigates the introduction of a solar heating and cooling system in an office building characterized by low energy demand with respect to the current national building stock and located in Southern Italy. Dynamic simulations are carried out in order to evaluate the thermo-economic performance of the analyzed system considering different solar panel technologies (flat plate and evacuated tube), tilt angles (10-70°), collecting areas (30-60 m2), hot and cold storage sizes, reference emission factors, electricity and natural gas unitary prices. To satisfy cooling demand a small scale adsorption chiller activated by thermal energy available from solar collectors is considered. The solar heating and cooling system demonstrated primary energy saving and equivalent dioxide carbon emission reduction higher than 23% in comparison to the reference conventional system. The results show that the solar energy system will be competitive when the electricity and natural gas prices will be high and strong government incentives will be provided.