Monasteries and churches

The monasteries of the Serbian Orthodox Church were, as a rule, built at hidden, sunny locations — at foothills, in ravines and alike. As the jewels of our cultural heritage, monasteries are the places of pilgrimage of a large number of well-off people (possible sponsors) from all over the world.

Although majority of the monasteries is connected to power grid, within monastery buildings there is a wide space for application of PV modules (for lighting of monk and set — aside cells, pump drive and alike). For example, in Serbian monastery Hilandar ar the Atos peninsula (Greece), during 1995, and 1996, two PV systems (360 W and 433 W) were installed with 500 and 1,470-Ah accu-batteries, respectively. [13]

Wise utilization of solar energy in monastery objects, due to emulation affect, should be soon implemented in town and village churches, too. Solar lighting of church yards as the place of spiritual gathering of people may, same as at schools, serve an impressive example of demonstration of application of solar cells.

Without more detailed analysis of this unusual market for solar cells, we assume moderate increase of implementation from 20 kW in 2006, to 130 kW in 2010. (Table 9.).

Table 9: Anticipated dynamics of application of PV systems in monasteries and churches

Application/year

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

Monasteries and churches (kW)

20

40

75

120

130