Role of solar water heater refurbishment in student hostel building to achieve sustainability goals: A techno-economic study

Solar energy technologies are emerging as strong alternatives to their fossil fuel-based conventional counterparts for various applications. Solar water heating system (SWHS) is one of the most adopted technologies all over the world. Moreover, the building sector consumes significant energy from fossil fuels worldwide to meet hot water demand. This fossil fuel consumption can be reduced with the surplus economic and environmental benefits through the refurbishment of SWHSs in residential buildings. Additionally, the student hostels of academic institutes/Universities have great potential to save energy, environment, and money. In view of the same, the technical, economic, and environmental analyses of refurbishing SWHS in the student hostel are presented in the present paper. The analysis is carried out for the hostel named ‘Raman’ of DIT University, located in Dehradun, India. The energy-saving potentials of flat plate collector (FPC)-based and evacuated tube collector (ETC)-based SWHSs to accomplish the hot water demand of selected site are assessed in comparison with electric geyser. Moreover, the economic analysis is also reported in terms of net present value and benefit-to-cost analysis. Whereas the environmental benefit is presented in terms of reduction in equivalent CO₂ emissions through implementing both types of considered SWHSs. It is found that the FPC-based and ETC-based SWHSs can fulfil 60.9 % and 67.6 % of the energy demand to heat the required water. Whereas, both of the systems are found economically as well as environmentally beneficial and ETC-based SWHS is recommended for the selected site. The present study may be useful for the energy planning and management of student hostels under academic institutes/Universities.