Probabilistic Method for Estimating the Level of Reliability of Solar Photovoltaic Systems for Households in Ghana

Abstract

Renewable Energy Resources have been identified among the most promising sources of harnessing power for industrial and household consumption but their power generations highly uctuate so building renewable power systems without critical reliability analysis might result in frequent blackouts in the power system. Therefore, in this paper, a robust, effective and ecient design approach is proposed to handle the reliability issues. The study involves a Mathematical modelling strategy of the PV system to estimate the total PV power produced and the Bottom-Up approach for predicting the household load demand. The reliability is defined in terms of Loss of Load Probability. The design methodology was validated with a University Household. The data used for the analysis consists of daily average global solar irradiance and load profiles. The results revealed that throughout the year, November-February is where the system seems to be more reliable. Also, the results indicated that without buck-up systems, the system would experience an average annual power loss of 17.8753% and thus, it is recommended that either solar batteries or the grid are used as backup system to achieve a complete level of reliability.