Feasibility Study of Solar Water Heaters in Algeria, a Review

Abstract

According to the statistics announced by Algeria's Ministry of Energy and Mine, residential and service sectors account for 40% of total energy consumption of the country of which a huge amount is dedicated to space heating and sanitary hot water. Therefore, using solar water heater (SWH) for providing a major part of this energy demand seems necessary in line with socio-economic development and continuous improvement of standards of living. Applications such as space and water heating are not well-developed in Algeria and no need to say that using energy management software packages is an excellent solution for enhancing management applications of energy development-based systems. Therefore current study uses TSOL and MeteoSyn software packages to investigate the potential of using SWHs for a residential apartment in 37 stations in Algeria. Results indicated that In Salah, Tamanrasset, and Adrar stations that respectively accounted for 85.6%, 81.2%, and 76,7% of total thermal demand provision were the most suitable ones for SWH usage. Also, given the results it can be observed that in case of using SWH in 37 stations, 150160 kWh of thermal energy for space heating and 99861 kWh for sanitary hot water is produced which, due to not using fossil fuels for generating this thermal energy, savings up to 56783 kg in CO2 emissions are obtainable annually.