Brewing is a very suitable application for solar thermal systems, because of the relatively low temperatures used in several production phases.
In the brewery of Flecks in Frohnleiten, a solar thermal system with Savosolar collectors is used to support the hot water production required by the brewing process. The heat from the collectors is stored in four 3,000 litre water tanks for later use in the brewing process. The mounted collectors also act as a rain shield.
Savosolar delivered -once again- the largest solar thermal installation in Finland. This system is located way North in Tupos, Liminka – less than 200 km from the Arctic Circle.
The heating load of Tupos district heating is usually covered by wood pellets. Yet during summer time, the load is often so low, that the substantial wood pellet burner cannot be properly used and an oil burner got used, instead. The special challenge here has been to design a very efficient solar thermal system that could replace the oil consumption in summer to run the district heating network almost completely fossil-free.
Savosolar has been selected to deliver a tracker mounted solar thermal plant for the district heating of Nansha, Guanghzou, China. The system is combined with a geothermal seasonal storage and a chiller (not in Savosolar’s scope of supply) which allow the owner to deliver healthy energy, both heating and cooling, to its customers.
Jelling Varmeværk is a Danish district heating plant in the historical village of Jelling, which is the former home of the Viking Chief Harald Bluetooth. Apart from the 20,125 m² collector field, Jelling Varmeværk produces its energy from a 1 MW wood chip boiler, a 1.5 MW absorption heat pump and 2 gas CHP engines with a total capacity of 8 MW heat and 6 MW electricity.
The first solar system was commissioned in summer 2016 and during its first week of operation, the collector field set a new Danish record by producing nearly 5 kWh/m² in a day.
The collector field in Jelling has double stanchions which allows for two collector rows to connect to one and the same pipe and thereby save costs and thermal losses. The annual solar thermal production is about 11,200 MWh, which covers over 25% of the town’s energy need for heating.
In 2018, Jelling Varmeværk placed a second order with Savosolar for the 4,836 m² extension of the successfully running existing collector field. The extension will be installed in first half of 2019 and it will further grow the fraction of district heating produced with solar energy.
“We chose Savosolar as our collector supplier due to their high efficiency in combination with their innovative solutions. They enable us to have an environmentally friendly, stable and low price for heating over the next 20 years. Collectors have integrated hose connections which means that they disturb the landscape as little as possible in an historic village of Jelling. The collectors can also follow the curvature of the landscape which means that we didn’t have to level out the ground of the field.”
