Within the SACE project, an easy-to-handle computer tool for pre-feasibility studies was created which provides a draft assessment of a reasonable value of collector area and storage size for a given building and climate and for a given solar collector type. Pre­condition is the availability of a defined formatted input file, containing both, meteorological data and load data. A number of files has already been prepared for different European locations and load structures and is delivered with the program. Further configuration of the desired system is done in the main input screen of the tool, i. e. the efficiency coefficients specifying the solar collector, the driving temperatures of the thermal cooling equipment and a global thermal COP have to be specified. More distinctions between the different thermal cooling processes are not made.

The program calculates on base of an hour-to-hour comparison of delivered heat from the solar system and required heat for cooling and for building heating annual values of the solar fractions for heating and cooling and net collector efficiencies. Automatically, a parametric study for different specific collector areas (expressed as m2 of collector area per m2 of conditioned room area) and for different specific hot water storage sizes (expressed as hours of storing the peak cooling load) is carried out. Figure 3 shows an example of the output of such a calculation. The SolarCoolingLight tool is available for free and may be downloaded from the SACE webpage.