Solar Cooling Technologies in Jordan: A Technical Study

In the recent years, solar cooling technologies for buildings have garnered increased attention. This study aimed to evaluate the performance of current solar thermal and solar photovoltaic (PV) air-conditioning technologies. Hence, the annual heating/cooling load profile and energy consumption of a reference building in the climate of Aqaba, Jordan were simulated using the TRNSYS software. The solar thermal and solar PV air-conditioning systems were designed and simulated to compensate the cooling demands. It was found that the annual cooling energy accounted for 96.3 % of the total annual energy demand (heating plus cooling) of the reference building. The solar PV and solar thermal air-conditioning systems compensated for direct cooling by 35.8 % and 30.9 %, respectively, and the corresponding compensations of cooling energy by the storage system were 7.3 % and 11.9 %, respectively. Thus, through this comparative study, we found that the storage system significantly contributed in compensating the cooling demands of the solar thermal system; however, the compensation to direct cooling was lower relative to the solar PV system