Considering:

• The use of infrared as an energy-efficient heating solution.
• Today’s low end-to-end low-carbon-electricity-based heating system efficiency.
• Today’s solution high RUN cost (due to energy cost and energy-intensive need for heating).

Our proposition is to:

• Directly use solar radiation (infrared) energy as a heating solution through a parabolic capture system (all spectrum, especially infrared).
• Captured directly “onsite”, which increases end-to-end system efficiency (no transport).
• Guided and propagated inside the house.

We will call this system further in the document: SunHeater

Evaluating the interest of the SunHeater

Taking as an example the city of Toulouse (South France).

• Input data:
  • The average recommended power (per m2) with today’s most efficient electricity-based heating solution
  • The amount of available radiation (source for the year of 2020)
  • A SunHeater end-to-end solution efficiency hypothesis of 80>#/span###

• Use Case (specifications)
  • A space to heat of 30m2
  • A target of 100% heating needs coverage from the month of March

The analysis gives the following results (formulas available on the excel file joined to the project):

Annexed documents in project files « Monthly in-plane irradiation for tracking system.pdf » and « SunHeater System Dimensioning.excel » data source « Monthly in-plane irradiation for tracking system.csv ». Source: https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/

Source 2 (Recommended power): https://www.foxof.com/nombre-et-puissance-radiateurs-electriques/

Analysis output:

• The diameter of the required parabol would be = SQUARE(INPUT in m2 / PI)*2 = 1,864988863 meters
• As for many sun-based solutions dimensioning to meet winter needs induces a production excess on summer (excess witch can also be used for other needs)