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• A new beehive system integrated with solar thermal/PV system was introduced. • Field comparison experiment of solar beehive and traditional beehive. • Solar beehive was more conducive to the survival of bees and the quality of honey. • The honey Baume degree in solar beehive was higher than that in traditional beehive. Bees not only produce honey but also provide the main pollination for most crops, while long maturation cycle, low yield of honey and even mass death of bees are observed in traditional hives due to the unfriendly internal thermal condition. In the present paper, a new beehive system integrated with solar thermal/PV system was introduced to optimize the internal thermal condition of the beehive and then to improve the yield and quality of honey. A local bee farm was selected to evaluate the operating performance of the solar beehive in a real natural environment. Comparative filed testing of the solar hive and traditional hive were carried out under different operating modes depending on the weather conditions all the year round. The variation of hive temperature, the quantity of honey collected, Baume degree and the amount of sugar feed consumption were measured and analyzed. The results showed that the air temperature in solar beehive was higher than that in traditional beehive in winter and transition seasons and lower in summer. The quantity of collected honey in the solar beehive was 15.8% more than that in the traditional beehive. The Baume degree indicated that honey can mature 2 days earlier in solar beehive. As to sugar feed consumption in winter, the corresponding quality in solar beehive was lower than that in traditional hive. These results indicated the feasibility of the conjunctive use of solar thermal/photovoltaic technology with the beehive that enlarges the solar energy applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Effect of passive heating renovation on energy poverty alleviation was verified. • Coal consumption and thermal comfort were measured and compared respectively. • Air tightness, thermal defect and indoor air quality were measured and evaluated. • Potential of the passive heating renovation was explored and further optimized. • Affiliated issues for alleviating energy poverty in policy, technology, etc. were discussed. Energy poverty refers to a situation that people cannot access and use energy safely. It is a major challenge for the global energy system because of its negative impacts on household income, health, education, gender equality and environmental conditions. To solve this problem, many countries advocate the development and promotion of passive solar technology, but the effectiveness of them for energy poverty mitigation has not been evidenced. Therefore, based on empirical studies in the rural areas of Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, this paper aims at investigating the effectiveness of passive solar heating renovation to alleviate energy poverty in rural plateau areas. Specifically, this paper compared and analyzed the coal consumption and indoor air quality during the heating period before and after the renovation of a single-storey building. Further, based on the IES-VE numerical simulation, this paper analyzed the impact of building envelope structure performance on indoor air temperature. The results show that after building renovation, the coal consumption during the heating period could be reduced by 97 kg/week, while the indoor average temperature of two bedrooms were increased by 4.8 °C and 1.7 °C respectively. Setting up the coal stove as an auxiliary heating device, can alleviate the defects of insufficient heating of passive solar energy technology, and indoor temperature could be further improved. However, indoor air quality was lowered because of the high PM 2.5 concentration. In contrast, improving envelope performance could further improve the average temperature of two bedrooms and the sunspace to 16.7 °C, 15.9 °C and 15.6 °C, meeting the requirements of indoor space heating. In general, passive solar heating could achieve satisfactory results, but to alleviate energy poverty effectively in rural plateau areas, further attention should be paid to other technical, economic, social and policy issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How to design water-in-glass evacuated tube solar water heater (WGET-SWH) with high heat collection rates has long been a question. Here, we propose a high-throughput screening (HTS) method based on machine learning to design and screen 3.538125 × 10 8 possible combinations of extrinsic properties of WGET-SWH, to discover promising WGET-SWHs by comparing their predicted heat collection rates. Two new-designed WGET-SWHs were installed experimentally and showed higher heat collection rates (11.32 and 11.44 MJ/m 2 , respectively) than all the 915 measured samples in our previous database. This study shows that we can use the HTS method to modify the design of WGET-SWH with just few knowledge about the highly complicated correlations between the extrinsic properties and heat collection rates of solar water heaters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]