The sky-high cost of solar air conditioning

Solar-powered air conditioners are substantially more expensive than a conventional air conditioning unit, coming in at about $2,000 before installation costs. Installation costs can bring the cost up to around $5,000. Some popular solar air conditioners on the market include:

1.A strong techno-economic viability is found in the integration between air-conditioning and solar photovoltaic systems, especially in tropical latitude regions where air conditioning systems are crucial to provide thermal comfort to building occupants; 2.

The most important variables impacting the viability of the integration between air-conditioning and solar photovoltaic systems areenergy price, energy price annual adjustment, PV cost and solar panel efficiency.

Based on the state of the art presented, one of the main gaps found in the literature on HVAC systems was optimal configurations, on technical and economic terms, that lead to thepossibility of using photovoltaic systems integrated to air conditioning systems in closed environments that allow maintaining thermal comfort conditions.

In this way, the idea of using photovoltaic energy for the activation of air conditioning systems is strongly linked to it, as it was presented in Cao, Dai and Liu where a review of state of the art HVAC and its link to the net-zero energy building concept has been applied in the last 10 years.

The same range was defined for the solar panel efficiency, considering the technology evolution. Solar system net efficiency: Set value of 80% for the solar PV system. This value considered a loss due to temperature and irradiance level, module array mismatch, ohmic wiring, and inverter loss.