Analysis of Solar Photovoltaic Systems for Optimum Utilization in Microgrid Applications

Now-a-days in certain remote locations, microgrids are installed, supplied by solar power. But the Photo-voltaic (PV) generation and load consumption vary seasonally. If certain minimum supply hours are fixed per day, throughout the year, it results in underutilization of the solar plants. So, this paper aims at developing an analysis for arriving at season wise optimum supply hours, for such microgrid installations, by taking a case study of a 20kW solar plant installed at Tala, a remote village in the Bihar state, India. Currently, this plant supplies only 7 hours of electricity to consumers and the plant load factor is quite low. Each consumer kit comprises of Light Emitting Diodes (LED) and a fan along with an additional socket for mobile charging, limiting the total load to 117W. Factors like dark hours and ambient temperature are used to assess the load requirement of consumers in each season. For example, during hot and dry season, the fan supply requirement is for more hours, and during very cold season, the lighting is needed for longer time. As the solar power availability is also reduced during winter, a methodology is developed in this paper for energy balancing between PV generation and load consumption, which will be very useful to arrive at the optimum number of hours; the different types of loads can be operated in a day, during various seasons in a year. To attain continuous power supply, parallel design approach is applied to determine the required additional PV installations.