[8] There are several types of STES technology, covering a range of applications from single small buildings to community district heating networks.
The conferences originally focused exclusively on STES, but now that those technologies are mature other topics such as phase change materials (PCM) and electrical energy storage are also being covered.
Most recent were InnoStock 2012 (the 12th International Conference on Thermal Energy Storage) in Lleida, Spain[33] and GreenStock 2015 in Beijing.
A number of examples of the use of solar thermal storage from across the world include: Suffolk One a college in East Anglia, England, that uses a thermal collector of pipe buried in the bus turning area to collect solar energy that is then stored in 18 boreholes each 100 metres (330 ft) deep for use in winter heating.
Architect Matyas Gutai[42] obtained an EU grant to construct a house in Hungary[43] which uses extensive water filled wall panels as heat collectors and reservoirs with underground heat storage water tanks.
A number of homes and small apartment buildings have demonstrated combining a large internal water tank for heat storage with roof-mounted solar-thermal collectors.
The system was installed as an experiment to heat the world's first standardized pre-fabricated passive house[48] in Galway, Ireland.
The aim was to find out if this heat would be sufficient to eliminate the need for any electricity in the already highly efficient home during the winter months.
Annualized geo-solar (AGS) enables passive solar heating in even cold, foggy north temperate areas.
After a designed, conductive thermal lag of 6 months the heat is returned to, or removed from, the inhabited spaces of the building.
In hot climates, exposing the collector to the frigid night sky in winter can cool the building in summer.
The solar collector may be a sheet-metal compartment in the roof, or a wide flat box on the side of a building or hill.
AGS heating systems typically consist of: Usually it requires several years for the storage earth-mass to fully preheat from the local at-depth soil temperature (which varies widely by region and site-orientation) to an optimum Fall level at which it can provide up to 100% of the heating requirements of the living space through the winter.
This technology continues to evolve, with a range of variations (including active-return devices) being explored.
A more recent system is a Do-it-yourself energy-neutral home in progress in Collinsville, IL that will rely solely on Annualized Solar for conditioning.