Abstract

In this article, to assess the use of renewable energy sources, the method of social efficiency of substituting non-renewable fuels with renewable energy sources was used. Social efficiency means the difference of energy-environmental, economic or sociological effects connected with producing the same amount of usable product in conditions of applying reference fuel and renewable substitute energy source. The amount of useful product should equal the use of one substitute energy unit. The proposed method constitutes a generalization of the existing method of economic effect evaluation on the basis of the Economic Efficiency of Energy Substitution indicators (EEES). Furthermore, the relations of calculations which enable defining dimensionless indexes for the effects of interest and method of standardization of the social efficiency index were described. The procedure is applied for the evaluation of renewable energy sources (solar energy in solar collectors, boilers powered by biofuels and heat pumps using geothermal energy) to prepare hot tap water.