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importance into the building sector, taking into
account the existing potential of energy savings as
well as the increased social awareness on energy-
related issues. Indeed, in industrially developed
countries, buildings are contributing with more than
one-third of the total energy consumption, being
major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.
Consequently, and considering cooling-heating
requirements as well as building aspects, the use of
renewable resources and energy efficiency for space
heating and cooling purposes must be considered as
a relevant topic of interest for the current industrial
sector. In fact, there is a relevant interest in
evaluating and assessing the performance of solar
thermal solutions for those applications, mainly in
countries such as Spain, where the climate offers
appropriate opportunities. For these purposes, solar
refrigeration is more and more recognized as a
priority in developing countries, due to the needs for
minimizing the energy expenditure and
improvement the thermal requirements. In this
context, the use of solar energy for absorption
refrigeration research has been one of the hot issues
along this last decade (Wang, 2000). According to
several authors, refrigeration is particularly
attractive as a solar energy application due to the
near coincidence of peak cooling loads with the
available solar power (Sumathy, 2003). The
absorption system is one of the promising solar
thermal refrigeration methods, and it is
environmentally friendly along with low cost and
low maintenance requirements. Furthermore,
operating costs are 15% less than conventional air
conditioning systems. By installing solar assisted
cooling systems in southern European and
Mediterranean region, about 40–50% of primary
energy can be saved (Balaras, 2007). Under this
framework, the present paper is focused on
describing a demonstrative project financially
supported by the European Union aiming of
providing a real example of sustainable solution for
cooling large storage or commercial spaces, such as
logistic buildings, warehouses, wholesaler… where
temperature requirements are very restrictive.
The rest of the paper is structured as follows:
Section II gives detailed information about the
proposed solution Innovative aspects of the
demonstrative project is discussed in Section III.
Preliminary results are described in Section IV.
Finally, conclusions are given in Section V.
2 SYSTEM DESCRIPTION:
GENERAL OVERVIEW
From the different industrial sector activities, the
pharmaceutical distribution network in Europe
involves by around 1500 operating sites, delivering
more than 6400 hospital pharmacies, 135000
community pharmacies and around 8000 dispensing
doctors. They account for more than 80% of the
pharmaceutical distribution in Europe, delivering
each operating site around 329 pharmacies and 1.11
million people −on average−. This pharmaceutical
distribution system can be also considered as a
current warehouse for most hospitals, which rely on
this system the storage of medicines due to its
efficient and safe delivering systems (set by law, up
to 5 delivers a day and even instant delivery).
Nowadays, there is even a tendency on increasing
the number of those warehouses in Europe, since
logistic companies are getting into the market and
developing the export of medicines by setting
logistic warehouses around Europe. Regarding the
Mediterranean countries, about 630 warehouses are
operating, mainly in Italy, France and Spain, with a
surface of about 2 million m
2
and generating the
emission of around 62,000 Tons of CO
2
. In Spain,
there are 192 warehouses with a surface of around
600,000 m
2
, with a global energy costs of about 3
million €/year and generating about 18,600 Tons of
CO
2
/year.
With regard to storage temperature conditions,
this industrial sector presents strict and rigid
European and national regulations, being necessary
to follow properly severe temperature requirements.
Indeed, this industrial sector is very sensitive facing
environmental and economic problems. The severe
thermal conditions (25º C ± 2º C and humidity levels
of 60% ±5%) must be fulfilled in every medicine
warehouse located in Europe. These storage
conditions are set by the Directive 2001/83/EC
−amended by Directive 2004/27/EC− and the
subsequent national regulations and codes of good
practices in each country.
In Spain, the Law 29/2006 about guaranties and
rational use of medicines and health products is in
charge of regulating these requirements. However,
this regulation framework is currently fulfilled at
very high economic costs and, in some cases, with
no-efficient technological solutions, involving
remarkable environmental costs. Under this
scenario, the Medicool project gives an alternative
solution to this problem by applying, testing and
validating new industrial processes implemented
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