Modelling and optimisation of a solar PV household with battery storage

This research project was funded by the Australia-Indonesia Centre to support the development of appropriate policies for increasing the proportion of electrified villages and premises in remote areas of Indonesia. The methods developed in this work will be relevant to electrification in other areas in the world such as Africa and continental Asian countries such as India. The focus of the work was to develop techno-economic models of isolated domestic buildings (homes) and develop tools that could identify the key parameters for optimal configurations of solar panels and batteries for household consumption levels between 10 and 200 kWh per month. The aim of using these models was then to assess the maximum distance over which such homes should be connected to enable the designs to be optimised having regard to the diversity of household demand and the fact that some buildings would have preferred roof orientation to better match the solar energy supply with the pattern of household electricity demand should such premises be electrified in this way. The objective was to see if there were consistent patterns in the optimal designs over a range of electricity consumption so that microgrid design could progress without the need for stochastic supply/demand modelling.