High Vacuum Flat Plate Hybrid Photovoltaic-Thermal Collectors: Economic and Environmental Comparison over Stand-Alone Devices

This work aims to conduct an economic and environmental numerical analysis to determine when a novel hybrid High Vacuum Photovoltaic-Thermal flat-plate collector (HV PV-T) is preferable over the stand-alone devices, i.e. commercial photovoltaic (PV) panel and solar thermal collector (ST), through two algorithms defined in Matlab. The HV PV-T is a device that simultaneously produces electrical and thermal energy. It is designed to meet the thermal energy requirement and uses a low-emissive transparent conductive oxide (TCO) film to reduce radiative losses. Photovoltaic-thermal collectors are typically used for low-temperature industrial applications, but the industrial sector requires thermal energy at middle-high temperatures. Therefore, the authors of this work conducted their analyses by setting the operating temperature to 100 °C while also investigating a range of thermal emittance values of TCO and different climatic zones. The economic algorithm identifies its most cost-effective market cases in simple pay back terms. The environmental algorithm evaluates the annual CO2 emission saved.