Stand-alone PV System For Remote Area Refrigeration: Techno-economic Case Study in Egypt.

Abstract

This paper considers the optimum design of a standalone photovoltaic (PV) system to drive a refrigerator located in a remote (off-grid) area. The optimality criterion is to obtain a design with a minimum cost of generated kWh. The cost parameters affect the PV array size and the battery storage size. It is shown that as PV array size increases, the battery size decreases to a specific limit. The optimum design should satisfy the condition that the State of Charge (SOC) of the Battery on January 1 is the same as at the end of December 31. This means that the Battery stored charge remains constant at the end of the year, i.e., the PV system supplies the load energy. This research concentrates on the effect of battery storage systems on both system reliability and system cost. Based on a developed simulation program, the results obtained in this research showed that the cost of kWh generated remains low till 99.3% reliability. Any increase of reliability over 99.3% increases the cost significantly.