INTRODUCTION

The use of renewable energy in buildings is a very important challenge in order to decrease their primary energy consumption. In South of Europe, most of buildings, especially tertiary ones, need active cooling in summer and this often represents an important way to save fossil energy. Solar cooling technologies already exists and have shown their effectiveness at the demonstration stage. But some particular precautions must be taken at different levels to have the best conditions.

This method is aimed at presenting a methodology based on a check list. The decomposition of the problem in different and following steps permits to see whether the project is realisable or not at the design phase. If this is the case, the method shows afterwards the requirements on some parameters of the projects : materials, planner, building owner, installer, exploitation staff and monitoring of the installation.

Thanks to this check list method, an integration of a solar cooling system can be done in suitable conditions. For instance, the method can make appear decisive parameters which would be very unfavourable for a successful project. This check list is based on the feed back of European solar cooling experiences in the framework of the IEA Task 38.

WHY A CHECK LIST ?

First of all, it is to note that the exposed method is applicable in the actual demonstration stage of the solar cooling technology and may be obsolete in the future when prices will decrease and overall reliability increase. The studied solar cooling systems are limited to solar thermal driven installations. The use of a check list method is based on the following experience : so that a solar cooling project is successful, it has to meet several different requirements : technical, economical and organisational ones.

Some of the requirements are totally compulsory and others are more or less important. But at the stage of a feasibility study, a succession of questions has to be pointed out and the corresponding answers should give a good idea of the feasibility or not of the project. The synthetic check list presentation is a good way to summarize in a same document these requirements and the position of the project for each one. A scoring was also imagined to quantify the suitability of a project in comparison with another one. Please answer the questions of the check-list in the next page