Solaris Case Study

There are 195 million households in Europe whose combined domestic heating needs account for over 26% of Europe's energy demand and 500 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions annually. Reducing this is very important if Europe is to achieve ambitious emission reduction targets (ie Kyoto and beyond), decrease our excessive reliance on imported energy and reduce costs to households and industry.

The most effective way to decentralise energy production is to increase the amount of generation at source, in this case within the home. A common barrier to the adoption of most energy generation/saving technologies is the high initial investment cost which results in long payback periods even considering current high energy prices.

However, with prices increasingly on the rise, existing technologies such as solar thermal heating systems and heat pumps are becoming more popular (growth rate of approximately 50% in 2006). Although both are reasonably efficient, existing solar thermal heating systems generally only provide up to ~60% of a typical household's annual hot water demand. Air source heat pumps are more effective and can provide up to 100% of total household heating requirements but their performance decreases significantly in winter and they suffer from frost-build up. As these technologies are becoming commodity products, SME's in these markets are coming under increasing pressure from cheap low-quality imports from Asia and technologies from the US.

It is paramount that European SME's keep a technological edge over these competitors if they are to remain competitive. The Solaris consortium therefore propose to develop a modular novel solar air source heat pump system (ASHP) which is 25% more efficient than a typical air source heat pump and 7% more efficient than a combination of a standard ASHP and a solar thermal system while only costing 60% of the combined price of these separate systems. The Solaris system will result in significant savings to the European energy consumer (€165m to 2020), reduced CO2 emissions and a significant financial return to the Solaris supply chain (€177m to 2020).