Palestine owns high potential of solar energy radiations at the same time it suffers from high prices and shortage of conventional energy sources. The exploitation of renewable energy sources especially solar energy is considered one of the robust solutions for this problem. Solar water heaters (SWH) are one of the most important applications utilized in Palestine. This paper assesses technically and financially the implementation of SWH systems in health sector through a case study in one of the Palestinian hospitals located in Nablus/west bank.

A collective SWH system supplemented with auxiliary heater for a hospital is designed in this study. The hospital demand for hot water is about 5500 liters /day. In direct closed loop forced SWH with water storage tanks are used. Auxiliary water heating is to be provided via diesel fueled boiler. 

The location of the proposed SWH is in the center of the load in order to reduce the transmission losses specially the hospital building is horizontally extended. The RETScreen® software solar water heating project model is utilized in this paper to perform simulations. The total collectors’ area is 77.52 m² of evacuated type. The capacity of proposed system is about 47.6kW. The annual heating energy delivered by the SWH collector system is 62.2 MWh which corresponds to 61% solar fraction.

The simple payback period of the project is 2.8 years and the equity payback is 2.2 years. The corresponding CO₂ savings is about 16.5 tons on the basis that coal is the base case electricity system fuel type.

Conference Title

"International Green Energy Conference InGEC & EmHyTec 2016 - Jointly for Research, Innovation and Policy for Clean and Sustainable Energy in the Euro Mediterranean Region" Tunis Chartage on May 9-12, 2016

Conference Country

Tunisia

Conference Date

May 9, 2016 - May 12, 2016

Conference Sponsor

ETRERA 2020 - Empowering Trans-mediterranean Renewable Energy Research Alliance for 2020 energy targets

Additional Info

Conference Website