Intelligent Design of PV based Home Supply using a Versatile Simulation Tool

Political targets and financial incentives lead to increased installation of photovoltaic (PV) generation plants. Today´s planning and design of such assets is usually based on global energy harvest considerations only. Efficient exploitation of the given insolation, on the other hand, would require for any grid-parallel or detached supply configuration to: adequately rate the components according to given infrastructural and economic circumstances; regard location specific temporal insolation and electricity demand and, especially in the case of detached systems with energy storage, occurring peaks; and consider the operational control performance. For both optimal dimensioning and control strategy development, a versatile simulation tool was developed enabling to investigate the characteristics of dispersed generation components to be installed as well as their interaction within a complete supply system under high temporal resolution and simulation fidelity. Exemplary application of this tool is shown with the intelligent design of various PV based home power supply solutions; for complex plant variants genetic algorithm based optimization of devices rating and applied control parameters has proven well