Paper presented to the 3rd Southern African Solar Energy Conference, South Africa, 11-13 May, 2015.
The interaction of electricity supply and
demand is important in the process of system
optimization. There is never a perfect match
but reduced mismatch benefits the functioning
of the system. Too small supply relative to the
demand increases the risk of collapse in terms
of black-outs, and too large supply relative to
the demand increases system cost. For small,
isolated systems these supply-demand
interactions grow in importance due to
limitations in redundancy. Since photovoltaics
(PV) has its major comparative advantages in
off-grid systems and is often deployed in
small, decentralized applications the supplydemand
interactions are of large importance
for successful PV deployment. Thus,
knowledge of the electricity demand and its
variations with various users and as a function
of time at different time scales is a key for PV
deployment success. In this paper, a range of
issues relating to PV-supplied demands and
loads are discussed.
