Professor André Augusto has expertise in photovoltaics (PV), including, PV manufacturing and prototyping, PV integration, and PV sustainability. Presently, he is the Director of the Sustainable Energy Research Centre (SERC), and the Head of the Energy and Built Environment group at Dalarna University in Sweden. Before joining Dalarna University, he was leading a team at Arizona State University in the USA, working on high efficiency solar cells and modules, and he was the industry liaison for the PV Foundry, a project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy to support startups working on PV technology.
Heating represents close to 50% of global energy demand. In industry, over 70% of the final energy used is for heat. In the building sector, this number is closer to 80%. In industry, 90% of heat sources are fossil fuels, while in buildings it is closer to 60%. In this work, we discuss hybrid photovoltaic (PV) solutions to accelerate the decarbonization of industrial and household heating for temperature regimes below 150°C, which represent 30% of industrial heating needs and almost the entirety of household needs. Concerning industrial heating, we discuss a solar hybrid system from a techno-economic perspective to produce steam for the food and beverage industries, where we combine parabolic solar collectors with pressurized water thermal storage and PV with high-temperature sand storage, demonstrating economically competitive solar fractions as high as 90%. For household hybrid heating systems, we summarize our results on system performance assessment of PV, heat pump, and thermal storage hybrid systems, including the latest results on the optimization of a accelerated laboratory system test method to forecast annual energy performance.
