New Croatian high technology and renewable energy products in accordance with EU legislation and standards

In accordance with Directive 2002/91/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council on the energy performance of buildings, and following intentions and tasks of the Market Deployment Working Group of the European Photovoltaic Technology Platform to bring building industries and professionals into a position to appropriate PV in order to use it as a versatile building components, Centre for Renewable Energy Sources (CERES), as a non-profit and non-governmental organization, proposed and initiated the Croatian Solar House (CHS) project, based primarily on "passive house" concept and fulfilling most of the objectives of efficient energy utilization and conservation. As a parallel action, in the field of Building Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV), new Croatian patents have been filed and internationally protected, dealing with new types of building facades and roofs with prefabricated photovoltaic panels consisting of stationary truncated compound parabolic concentrator (CPC) mirrors and active PV segments made of amorphous silicon (a-Si) submodules. With the concentration ratio less than 2, and with a minimal protrusion from the walls and roofs, the CPC mirrors sastisfy both economic and aesthetic criteria, and as less costly than PV modules, they decrease the overall area cost of those large compound panels adapted to the requirements of the building industry. A special feature of asymmetrical CPC panels with inclined PV segments, intended for integration into facades, has been their ability to transform less favorable solar irradiation on vertical walls to much larger values such as on the already optimally inclined roofs. This invention may open the whole new market in the building industry. Another patent deals with hybrid PV-thermal modules providing simultaneously electricity and hot water at the same area of the roof. Larger deployment of both inventions may offer to the Croatian industry the high technology export products.