Evaluation of increased electricity production when cooling solar panels

A municipal housing company located in the south of Sweden has energy renovatedseveral buildings with a total of 380 apartments to meet today’s energy standards. Several energyefficient technologies and solutions were implemented and the energy consumption for thesebuildings were lowered by 50%. One of the buildings functions as a demonstration building forinnovative solutions such as low temperature district heating, waste water heat recovery, andsolar photovoltaic and thermal (PVT) panels. The solar PVT panels are cooled down with themain purpose to increase the electricity production. The cooling medium for these panels iscirculated through two bedrock boreholes to dissipate the collected heat. The heat from theboreholes is then used for an electric heat pump to produce heat to send to the local districtheating company. The electricity produced is primarily used in the building. The objective ofthis paper is to assess the electricity production from real-life outdoor Photovoltaic-thermal(PVT) plant. The plant was installed on the roof top of an energy renovated multi-familyapartment building located in the south of Sweden. The cooling of the panels were turned on andoff to assess if the electricity production would increase or not. The electricity production didnot increase when the cooling was applied. The temperature measuring equipment which wasinstalled at the wrong position and was supposed to measure the temperature at the back of thePVT is needed to compare the efficiency of the PVT plant and draw further conclusions