The core problem is that buildings consume most of the available energy at the global level, in order to cover their needs for heating and cooling and they get this energy from burning fossil fuels and electricity with an impressive negative result as far as environmental and economical factors are concerned.
According to the European Renewable Energy Council, heating and cooling in buildings accounts for 49% of Europe’s energy demand: efficiency gains are therefore required in building heating/cooling at the local distributed level, better use of thermal energy being crucial to meet the 2020 renewable energy targets and Europe’s 2050 target of a 80-95% reduction in GHG emissions.
At present, the heating and cooling in buildings are mostly covered by fossil fuels and electricity, showing the following characteristics:
• They are scarce;
• The electricity that is used for heating and cooling in buildings can not be produced from photovoltaic without the support of the expensive electricity grid;
• Their extraction and transfer results in destroying the natural environment;
• Their use produces gas, responsible for greenhouse effect, polluting the environment and causing health problems, thus decreasing the quality of our lives;
• The spheres of power around fuel production and transportation result in political instability, often leading to conflicts and wars.
Solar power is an abundant source of energy, but, still, it is not exploited as much as it could: at the local distributed level (building thermal energy consumption), utilization of solar energy is very low, mainly due to the fact that both the domestic buildings and the industrial applications need high quality thermal energy (heat), i.e. energy at high temperatures (like the heat of the radiators that warm up the house, or the heat needed for pasteurization in food industry), cannot be achieved by the current solar systems (flat and vacuum tube) in a financially feasible way.
The penetration of the current solar systems in the market of the heating and cooling for buildings is less than 10%, leaving out of a huge market (heating and cooling in million of buildings), the solar energy, one of the most important renewable energy resource, available on our planet.
The global objective of LIGHTHOUSE is to introduce an innovative, cost-effective technological solution, namely a concentrated thermal solar collector, allowing the solar energy to enter the market of heating and cooling buildings at the local distributed level, in an effective and financial feasible way.
Specifically, our goal is to install on the available terrace on the buildings Lighthouse Concentrated Solar Collectors with solar tracking and connect them to the heating and cooling system, in order to substitute up to 60% the fossil fuels and the electricity that these buildings use for heating and cooling, with solar thermal energy at high temperature, with a very short pay pack period of around three years (no current solar thermal system can achieve this, in high temperature applications like heating and cooling).
LIGHTHOUSE’s main goals throughout the project (Feasibility Study) are the following:
• On the technical side, assessing the energy performance that the Fresnel lenses manufacturers offer (acrylic or silicon on glass), in order to identify the best suppliers and the best available performance/cost ratio of different Fresnel lenses (in thermal applications).
• On the commercial and financial side, we developed a business strategy aiming at supporting both the sustainability and the market replication of LIGHTHOUSE, to be further accomplished in Phase 2 of the SME Instrument. In Phase 1, the best suppliers of raw materials, the market size, the competitive background and the threats/opportunities for entering the market were analysed. It lead to a specific definition of the market penetration strategy and LIGHTHOUSE’s business model. LIGHTHOUSE also addressed to the following objectives: identification of the regulatory requirements of the product and setup of a strategy for the intellectual property management. Further to this, a preliminary study over the design of the product and development of a brand identity for BCND was carried out.
