Designing of a 2kW stand-alone PV system in Bangladesh using PVsyst, Homer and SolarMAT

In today's world the demand of energy is incredibly high and non- renewable resource such as ore, fossil fuel and nuclear fuel are not sufficient to meet this demand. Eventually renewable energy is a better choice. There is an increasing trend of using solar cell in the industry as well as to household appliance because solar energy is expected to play a prominent role in future smart grid as a distributed renewable source. For optimal and large scale integration of solar energy several modeling software and computer program is used. In this paper a stand-alone solar system of 2kW with battery backup, being located in Dhaka, Bangladesh is designed by using a MATLAB program named SolarMAT and two popular software PVsyst v5.06 and HOMER. Both PVsyst and HOMER are versatile and renowned software in the field of solar system design and modeling. PVsyt and HOMER have to be purchased, unlike SolarMAT, which is a free tool and it is developed in MATLAB environment which can also accurately design a solar system but not that much like the other two. To check the acceptance of these software, the final result will be compared with the practical data. Another widespread photovoltaic solar system configuration known as grid tie system can also be designed by both of these tools.