Solar Cogeneration of Electricity and Hot Water at DoD Installations
EW-201248
Objective
Conventional solar photovoltaic (PV) systems convert less than 20% of the sun's incident energy into electricity and struggle to dissipate the remaining 80+% as heat. Their low efficiency requires large systems to generate a significant amount of renewable energy and contributes to PV's struggle to achieve cost parity with the grid. Solar hot water (SHW) systems suffer from even longer payback times. These issues severely limit the number of cost-effective deployment opportunities at Department of Defense (DoD) facilities and will make it challenging for DoD to reach its renewable energy and greenhouse gas (GHG) goals, which include fulfilling 25% of all facility energy requirements with renewable energy by 2025 and 30% of all hot water consumption in every new or renovated building with solar heated water.
The objective of this project is to demonstrate the ability of Cogenra Solar's SunDeck system to generate significantly more renewable energy, energy value, and GHG reductions as compared with widely available solar PV and SHW technologies, while also reducing cost. Demonstrations will be conducted at Naval Base Ventura County, California, and Camp Parks, California.
Technology Description
The SunDeck system combines proven PV and SHW technologies into a single integrated solar cogeneration system that extracts as much of the sun's incident power as possible as high-value electricity and delivers the rest as useful heat. By sharing equipment and installation costs across the PV and SHW roles, this approach can generate substantially more renewable energy value at relatively low incremental cost over PV or SHW alone, yielding more attractive economics. The solar collectors are essentially water-cooled concentrating PV (CPV) parabolic troughs that capture rather than dissipate what other PV approaches call "waste heat."
Benefits
The integrated solar cogeneration system is expected to deliver approximately 5 times the total energy (electricity + heat) with more than twice the total economic value and 2.6 times the GHG reductions compared with a PV system of the same size installed at the same location, yielding a much faster payback. These advantages will create more deployment opportunities that are cost-effective, delivering greater energy benefits, energy security benefits, economic benefits, and GHG benefits for each new project commissioned. Engineering templates and design and decision tools for DoD facilities will be developed in this project to accelerate implementation of the technology across DoD. (Anticipated Project Completion - 2014)
Points of Contact
Principal Investigator
Mr. Ratson Morad
Cogenra Solar, Inc.
Phone: 650-230-3404
Document Types
- Fact Sheet - Brief project summary with links to related documents and points of contact.
- Final Report - Comprehensive report for every completed SERDP and ESTCP project that contains all technical results.
- Cost & Performance Report - Overview of ESTCP demonstration activities, results, and conclusions, standardized to facilitate implementation decisions.
- Technical Report - Additional interim reports, laboratory reports, demonstration reports, and technology survey reports.
- Guidance - Instructional information on technical topics such as protocols and user’s guides.
- Workshop Report - Summary of workshop discussion and findings.
- Multimedia - On demand videos, animations, and webcasts highlighting featured initiatives or technologies.
- Model/Software - Computer programs and applications available for download.
- Database - Digitally organized collection of data available to search and access.