Hi John, What you propose is indeed a very useful idea, and other people have already worked on it. Check out RETScreen, developed by your very own Natural Resources of Canada, or RAPSIM, developed at Murdoch University in Australia. I bet NREL in the US has something along these lines too, but I don't know its acronym.
Developing such a model is a big project I think - its not so much the technical difficulty as the huge amount of data you'd have to collect and organise. I think the packages I mentioned before are still pretty close to their research origins, so you could get inside them and modify them. I'd vote for customising an existing model rather than developing your own from scratch. Incidentally, the example project you suggested at the beginning of your email would be wildly uneconomic because photovoltaics would be a crazy choice for generating low grade heat. Thermal panels would be far cheaper, by a factor of 10 at least. As an example of a thermal collector, have a look at Solarwall (http://www.solarwall.com). You might even be able to see an example of their systems on the Bombardier plant, just down the road from you in Ville-St Laurent. Thermal storage is also vastly cheaper than electrical storage - all you need is a big pile of broken rocks that you blow warm air through, rather than a complex hydrogen electrolyser and fuel cell. Will -------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Will Keogh Visitor at the Centre for Sustainable Energy Systems Australian National University Canberra ACT 0200 Australia --------------------------------------------------------------------
