Design and Control of an Off-Grid Solar System for a Rural House in Pakistan

Abstract

This paper presents an off-grid photovoltaic (PV) system for a house in the rural community of Pakistan. The designed system is capable of satisfying all the electrical needs of the house throughout the year. This off-grid solar PV system is expected to provide 40 kWh per month as per data collected from the electric bill of the house. Steady-state modeling of the system is carried out in Homer software. The results of the homer simulation show the annual expected electrical output of this system by using the solar irradiance, temperature, and humidity data of the selected location. The designed system uses four solar panels of 140 watts each making a total of 560 watts solar panels, four batteries of 125 Ah each, and an inverter of 1 kW to meet the electrical requirements of the selected house. This paper also presents a simple method of control and data-logging of the designed system.