Operation strategy of residential centralized photovoltaic system in remote areas

Abstract

Photovoltaic (PV) systems have found fairly wide application in remote isolated area. However, each individual PV system usually supplies energy only to one consumer. In such a case we have several consumers that each one of them uses a stand-alone PV system. This situation would expose such stand-alone systems to transient excessive loads larger than the power generated by the PVs, and then the battery is bound to discharge even during the day. For overcoming this problem, we suggest an autonomous centralized PV system, comprising one battery bank and plural subsystems connected to each other. From solar radiation data and load profiles, the performance of the PV centralized system is simulated by using a time step scheme. The advantages of this system are found to be the large charging rate of power, high efficiency, and low cost compared with conventional individual PV systems and hybrid systems. In addition, the economic study shows that the life cycle cost and the price of kilowatt hour generated in the centralized system is lower than that for the individual systems.