An overview of solar cooling technologies markets development and its managerial aspects

Commercial buildings consume a considerable amount of fossil fuel that directly has negative impacts on the environment. In fact this leads to significant greenhouse gas emissions and the production of non-environmental friendly materials. Hence global warming is the most common dilemma facing world governments at the present time. Solar cooling technologies proved to be a successful alternative for conventional cooling systems especially in hot and sunny climates. The solar cooling technologies are able to reduce electricity demand since it relies on solar energy to produce cooling. There are many research articles that focus on the solar cooling technologies technical and engineering developments meanwhile there are limited research activities detailing its barriers, opportunity, architectural and managerial aspects. This research paper outlines the potential markets of solar cooling systems, as well as their architectural and managerial implications. The article also discusses, and suggests recommendations to overcome issues and barriers during solar cooling systems installation phase. In addition the article presents the solar cooling systems industry markets development and the potential of implementing the solar cooling technologies in livestock storage facilities, crops drying business, hospital

Fuzzy logic based environmental indicator for sustainability assessment of renewable energy system using life cycle assessment

The use of renewable energy system (RES) is increasing rapidly. However, it is still difficult to measure the environmental impact of renewable energy system. This study aims to develop a general environmental indicator which is able to reflect all the aspects of environmental impacts of a RES. The life cycle assessment (LCA) and fuzzy logic is used to develop an environmental indicator to assess all the environmental impacts. The five important environmental indicators are selected based on LCA standard: Abiotic Depletion Potential, Land Use, Climate Change, Photochemical Ozone Creation Potential and Acidification Potential. Fuzzy inference system isused to convert the original values of these indicators into fuzzy data and aggregate them into the general indicator. The computed fuzzy value of the general indicator is then defuzzified into a crisp number as the final indicator value of environmental impacts