A major challenge of designing off-grid PV power systems is the seasonal imbalance between the power demand of the building and power supply of the PVs. A majority of the energy produced by the PVs occurs during the summer when the sun shines brighter and for longer periods of time. With the typical PV system size, the PVs do not produce enough energy in the winter days to power the building and charge the batteries for nighttime. However, increasing the number of solar panels generates more energy during the winter days.
I wrote an algorithm to estimate the PV system size and energy storage capacity for an off-grid power system.
Link to the algorithm: https://github.com/OffGridEnergy/offgrid-solar-power-system
Post time: Jun-14-2017