Renewable energies are going to dominate our future energy supply systems and solar thermal energy is an important factor in this field. Large scale solar thermal projects in the pipeline (e.g. BigSolarGraz) and numerous studies carried out by namable institutes illustrate the huge potential.

Besides large scale projects for urban societies there exists a considerable number of different solar thermal applications that are very competitive in terms of primary energy input and economics as well as socioeconomic factors like access to energy, security of energy supply, load relief in respect of electricity grid infrastructures, job creation and so on.

The field of applications stretches from the meanwhile classical hot water preparation to large solar thermal heat/cold supply systems in industry and service buildings as well as systems feeding into the district heating system. There are some new applications in niche markets such as solar drying systems, hybrid systems (PVT) and concentrating solar systems with immense market potential.

In the actual issue of “nachhaltige technologien” we would like to report about promising applications and markets as well as address the activities of export-oriented companies.