Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Solar Energy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/solener 10 key principles for successful solar air conditioning design – A compendium of IEA SHC Task 48 experiences Daniel Neyer a,b, ⁎ , Manuel Ostheimer b , Daniel Mugnier c , Stephen White d a Daniel Neyer Brainworks, Oberradin 50, 6700 Bludenz, Austria b University of Innsbruck, Technikerstr. 13, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria c TECSOL SA, 105 Avenue Alfred Kastler – BP90434, 66000 Perpignan, France d CSIRO Energy Flagship, PO Box 330, Newcastle, NSW 2300, Australia ARTICLE INFO Keywords: IEA SHC Task 48 10 key principles Successful solar air conditioning design Technical and economic solutions ABSTRACT The results of past and ongoing activities, in successive IEA SHC (solar heating and cooling) Tasks, suggest enormous potential for solar cooling technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, solar thermal cooling still faces barriers to emerge as an economically competitive solution. IEA SHC Task 48 was introduced to gather learnings from existing installations, and to find technological and market solutions, which could enable industry to deliver solar thermal driven heating and cooling systems that are efficient, reliable and cost competitive. The selected experiences of these research activities were clustered into 10 qualitative key principles for successful design and operation of SHC systems. Three existing systems are fully discussed in a solar cooling design guide (Mugnier et al., 2017). This paper aims to introduce these key principles in its general format. The background to the qualitative statements is explained, supplemented with examples from the context of Task 48 and compared with recent literature. Furthermore, a survey was conducted among SHC experts, who provide an assessment of the importance of the principles. The result shows that all principles have their eligibility. However, it turns out that there are three main categories of principles: (i) essential, (ii) important and (iii) controversial. Following the key principles is not a guarantee, but they can support researchers, designers and contractors to implement solar heating and cooling systems successfully. 1. Introduction Solar Driven Heating and Cooling (SHC 1 ) Systems are a promising solution to cover the rising demand of air-conditioning. Due to its po- tential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, solar driven systems are included in the International Energy Agency (IEA 2 ) SHC Strategic Plan Key Technologies (Murphy, 2009). Several IEA SHC Tasks related to solar air-conditioning have been completed and supplied a considerable collaborative international effort to develop this technology from fun- damental R&D, to demonstration projects, and to market introduction. During operation of IEA-SHC Task 25 (1999–2004) an outlook for solar cooling was delivered to initiate industrial development and en- couraging maturation of the technology. Tools and methods to support market introduction of the emerging technology were created during Task 38 (Henning, 2006). The efficiency and reliability of the latest generation of solar cooling systems (at that time) were evaluated and demonstrated – pilot installations were analysed in detail. Data analysis from these installations has shown that under certain conditions and with a considerable effort during design, installation, commissioning and operation, the technology is reliable, promising and competitive in terms of energy performance and environment amenity. The number of commercial deployments has increased steadily, and interest in solar air-conditioning (SAC 3 ) has grown over the last years. A survey by Mugnier and Jakob (2015) has estimated the number of worldwide installations at nearly 1200 systems in 2014. The installa- tion growth is shown in Fig. 1. However, this promising technology was perceived to face two main issues: (1) a general lack of economic competitiveness – as is the case https://doi.org/10.1016/j.solener.2018.03.086 Received 1 October 2017; Received in revised form 28 February 2018; Accepted 31 March 2018 ⁎ Corresponding author at: Daniel Neyer Brainworks, Oberradin 50, 6700 Bludenz, Austria. E-mail address: daniel@neyer-brainworks.at (D. Neyer). 1 SHC – Solar Heating and Cooling. 2 IEA – International Energy Agency. 3 SAC – Solar air-conditioning. Solar Energy xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx 0038-092X/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Please cite this article as: Neyer, D., Solar Energy (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.solener.2018.03.086