Intelligent Design of PV based Home Supply using a Versatile Simulation Tool

Political targets and financial incentives lead to increased installation of photovoltaic (PV) generation plants. Today's planning and design of such assets is usually based on global energy harvest considerations only. Efficient exploitation of the given insolation, on the other hand, would require for any grid-parallel or detached supply configuration to: adequately rate the components according to given infrastructural and economic circumstances; regard location specific temporal insolation and electricity demand and, especially in the case of detached systems with energy storage, occurring peaks; and consider the operational control performance. For both optimal dimensioning and control strategy development, a versatile simulation tool was developed enabling to investigate the characteristics of dispersed generation components to be installed as well as their interaction within a complete supply system under high temporal resolution and simulation fidelity. Exemplary application of this tool is shown with the intelligent design of various PV based home power supply solutions; for complex plant variants genetic algorithm based optimization of devices rating and applied control parameters has proven well