Does using solar towards central heating work?
It's tempting just to write:
No
But after your detailed explanation, I feel some more justification is required.
The reason why I don't believe that solar will work for heating is that when you need the heat, the solar tends to be in off mode.
And since there's no efficient way of storing the energy until we need it for the heating (summer round to winter) then to capture solar power for winter heating we need a large (expensive) system, and still need to store heat captured in the short day for release in the long night.
OTOH it does DHW fine.
In terms of cost for energy produced, solar collectors are far more efficient than solar PV. In the terms of the current market I don't really understand your logic.
There are some new interesting products that work extremely well with northern climes and can reach very high temperatures. Winter compensation provides an oversized array that produces a summer excess. There are projects looking at how to harness and generate from that excess.
The main problem is that there use doesn't fit the conventional grid system.
Your street / road would be a perfect example where solar space heating could provide an excess in summer locally where shared generation could provide huge benefits.
Its a combination of locally absorbed heat and distance shared generation that could provide many benefits in efficiencies and economies of scale. Shared community generation systems can provide electricity but where heat is needed it is stored or at least topped up daily.
