Economic analysis of a stand-alone residential solar PV system for a typical South African middle income household

Residential solar photovoltaic power generation systems are becoming increasingly popular now-a-days in South Africa with more and more customers now installing photovoltaic (PV) systems in order to power their homes. This paper presents the modeling and economic analysis of a small scale solar PV power generation system aimed to supply middle income residential customers. The modeling is done using the Hybrid Optimization Model for Electric Renewable (HOMER, version 2.68) software, considering the latitude and longitude of Cape Town as the South African customer base location in order to gather and generate solar irradiance data. The system design components such as photovoltaic (PV) array, the battery bank, converter, and AC load are considered, and component specifications (size, capital costs, replacement costs, etc.) are included and specified in HOMER to generate the PV system model. Three different cases considering the maximum annual capacity shortage of 0%, 5% and 10% are presented and compared against different technical and economic parameters detailed in the paper.