A study on standalone photovoltaic system with real meteorological data at Malaysia

This paper presents a simple method to determine the optimum sizes of solar array and battery bank for standalone photovoltaic (SPV) systems under the given load by using energy balance concept. The energy efficiency models of system components and the long-term solar radiation data obtained from Malaysian Meteorological Services Department are adopted. In the process of sizing system components, the loss of power supply probability (LPSP) is used to express system reliability. Then, the LPSPs of the systems at different sizes of solar array and battery bank are calculated. Based on the minimum cost of the systems, the optimum combination of solar array and battery bank is determined. With these optimum sizes, the operating performance of the designed SPV systems is given