## 3 Results
### The Micro-Solar CHP Plant Performance  
The performance of the micro-solar ORC plant was investigated during a whole year with a simulation time step of 10 min. Weather data (i.e., solar radiation and ambient temperature) were taken from the Energy+ [32] database for the city of Lerida in Spain, which is close to the town of Almatret, where the Innova Microsolar prototype plant is located. For the sake of the analysis, it was assumed, as often done in the literature, that the system can work under the given reference conditions at the condenser. More precisely, the return water temperature entering the condenser was assumed at 60 \({}^{\circ}\)C and the temperature difference equal to 10 \({}^{\circ}\)C, with a fixed flow rate of 0.5 kg/s, hence at a temperature level able to satisfy the thermal energy demands for space heating and hot water of residential users. As regard the load, two different profiles were considered: (i) a scale-down profile of a school building and (ii) a residential user profile related to four apartments with a floor area of 100 m\({}^{2}\) each. The thermal load of the school building was taken from [33],  
Figure 7: Confusion matrices for load-type classification by the ANN. while that of the residential user was calculated by means of TRNBuild [34], considering an indoor comfort temperature of 20 \({}^{\circ}\)C and according to the tap profile number 2, as reported in the European standard UNI EN 15316-3 [35] for space heating and domestic hot water, respectively. In addition, with reference to the residential user, an average electricity demand per apartment of 3600 kWh/year was considered based on the statistical data available in [36]. Anyhow, electrical load following was not considered in this work, and only a simplified coverage factor as the ratio between the electricity production from the plant and the overall demand was calculated for the residential user. First, the performance of the CHP plant in the case of a baseline controller was assessed, as reported in Table 6.  
Although the thermal energy collected by the solar field is about 110 MWh/year, the annual electrical and thermal energy production by the ORC unit corresponds to 6450 and 58,800 kWh, respectively. As expected, the performances of the proposed system were significantly affected by seasonality. Indeed, the ORC unit electrical and thermal energy productions were around eight times in July than in December. Furthermore, during the winter season, with the baseline controller, the operation of the TES unit was limited and even more its operating efficiency, which is defined as the ratio between the thermal energy output from the TES unit and the thermal energy input. This means that the thermal energy stored in the TES unit is dissipated into the ambient and not usefully recovered to satisfy the thermal energy demand of the users. To better understand the energy production of the proposed plant, we took into account the related number of hours of the different operation modes of the plant during the year as reported in Table 7. During the hot months, there is more solar radiation and the plant can store surplus energy in the PCM thermal storage, thus working for a consistent number of hours also in operation modes OM5 and OM6. Furthermore, the collected thermal energy is so high that the system is forced to defocus, thus operating also in OM\(-\)1. Later, the performances of the plant were evaluated for both thermal load profiles using the case of a fuzzy logic controller aimed at satisfying the thermal energy demand of the users by means of the plant operation. Tables 8 and 9 report the plant performances when coupled with a school building load profile.