PVOpt: a User-friendly Software for Optimally Sizing Standalone Photovoltaic Power Systems for Palestine

By the trend of utilizing photovoltaic (PV) systems, especially standalone PV system, in Palestine, the design of such system was carried out mostly using an intuitive method. Putting the intuitive method under the spot reveals a lot of its weaknesses regarding the over or under design results. However, many methods and algorithms were proposed to overcome the drawbacks of the intuitive method. Throughout this paper, we will introduce an algorithm to find the optimal design in terms of size of PV panels and battery block. The new method is mainly based on numerical basis and deals with hourly data of global radiation, demand load and ambient temperature. The proposed method has proved, as demonstrated next, its effectiveness to have results much better than the intuitive one. Such results enable the system to be either less cost system or more suitable and stable one in terms of deficit power. It has proved also the accurate prediction of the system's performance that is hourly performance of system attitude. To utilize the proposed method for stand-alone systems sizing, the method was fostered by Graphical User Interface. Which enables others to use it in order to get more effective results than intuitive method.