Solar thermal cooling systems are a promising solution for reducing greenhouse gas emissions associated with the growing cooling demand for residential and commercial buildings. Nevertheless, they have been a niche application for many years, and there has not been a significant increase in the deployment of such systems due to their high investment and operation costs.

The European Commission, acting through the Intelligent Energy Europe program, funded this project, in which experts from various countries in Europe detected and analyzed the main barriers for the massive implementation of such systems. The project defined sa number of political, technological and financial measures and identified the best potential applications. The methodology was based on detailed field auditing and sensibility analysis using dynamic simulation across several European climates and building archetypes.