Opportunities for hybrid building integrated photovoltaic/thermal system in the city of Hong Kong: Case study on a commercial skyscraper

The modern world is facing challenges like the depletion of fossil fuels and the rising demand of energy while decreasing CO2 emission to counteract climate change. As the vast majority of mankind populates (mega-)cities, one option of tackling these challenges could be the installation of photovoltaic/thermal(PV/T) hybrid-solar systems on the facades of skyscrapers. This thesis investigates this option using Hong Kong as the study site due to the fact that it is one of the most densely populated cities in the world packed with high-rise buildings. The PV/T hybrid solar panel technology encompasses both a solar collector and solar cells. The heat produced by the solar cells can be used to heat up water and such heat can be transferred away from the solar cells, which increases the electrical performance. Our envisioned system will be installed on a commercial skyscraper the International Commerce Centre(ICC) and includes PV/T hybrid-solar panels, micro-inverters, pumps and heat storage. The main question of this thesis is: What are the opportunities for hybrid building integrated photovoltaic/thermal solar systems in the city of Hong Kong? The primary objective is to model such a system for a skyscraper in Hong Kong and investigate the thermal and electrical performance. The secondary objective is to assess the likely economic and environmental costs. The building is modeled in SketchUp. It will allow solar irradiance and shadowing effects to be taken into account following Sun's path. The exact position of the building with its facades orientation relative to the position of the sun and meteorological data from Meteonorm, are the inputs of the irradiance model running in Matlab and of the thermal model running in TrnSys. We have deployed the Perez model and taken into account the albedo component for modeling the diffused irradiance. The results of the irradiance and the thermal model are inputs for the total hybrid-solar system model, which outputs the electric and thermal yield and the water temperature as function of altitude on the building's facade. The simulated efficiencies in our hybrid-solar system are 53.1% for the thermal part and 16.5% for the electrical part. We have found that the temperature of panels does not exceed 40°C, which benefits the overall electrical efficiency. On the ICC 19,808 panels can be installed without covering any windows. According to our study, which does not take into account hydraulic losses when scaling up the hybrid-solar system to the whole building, the annual electrical and thermal energy yield are 3.39 GWh and 12.5 GWh, respectively. The thermal yield could be used in (pre-)heating water while the electrical yield could be fed back to the grid or also used internally.

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