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Solar heating and cooling (SHC) systems are currently under rapid development and deployment due to their potential to reduce fossil fuel use and to alleviate greenhouse gas emissions in the building sector – a sector which is responsible for ∼40% of the world energy use. The available technologies on the market for thermally driven cooling systems are absorption and adsorption chillers, solid and liquid desiccant cooling systems, and ejector refrigeration cycles. Of these, absorption chillers are considered as the most desirable method for harnessing solar thermal energy due to their relative maturity, reliability, and higher efficiency. In addition, absorption chillers can take advantage of economies of scale in large buildings to obtain a relatively good levelized cost of cooling as compared to other thermally-driven air-conditioning systems. In this paper, the background theory on solar-powered absorption chillers is …