SOLTRAIN - Southern African Solar Thermal Demonstration and Training Initiative

SOLTRAIN’s cumulative carbon & cost-savings impact quantified

Global

Submitted by Werner Weiss and Monika Spörk-Dür
Published 2 years, 9 months ago

The installation of solar thermal demonstration projects is an important part of the SOLTRAIN programme’s activities. On the one hand, the installations allow the SOLTRAIN community to apply knowledge gained during the training courses, and on the other hand, to show and demonstrate different solar thermal applications from small-scale systems for single family houses to large-scale systems in industrial applications.

The systems also serve as best-practice examples in order to facilitate broader market uptake.A cumulative 221 solar thermal systems with a combined collector area of 2,393 m² had been installed by end of December 2017 in the six SOLTRAIN partner countries.

638 tons of avoided CO₂ emissions

The annual solar yield of all solar thermal systems is 1,834 MWh. This corresponds to electricity savings of 2,017 MWh/a and 638 tons of avoided CO_²1*), and the figures for the individual countries can be seen in the table below.

The avoided electricity cost corresponds to ZAR 4.3 million based on city of Cape Town tariff in 2015 of 213.90 c/kWh including VAT.

At COP21 (United Nations Climate Change Conference), which took place in December 2015 in Paris it was agreed to respond to the global climate change threat by keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius. This can be reached by switching from a mainly fossil fuel-based economy to an energy supply system based on renewables, and the figures outlined above demonstrate the contribution of SOLTRAIN to the COP21 Agreements.

Table: Annual solar yield and corresponding electricity savings as well as avoided CO2 emissions of all solar thermal systems by end of December 2017, which were funded by ADA and OFID and installed in phase I - III of the SOLTRAIN project.