Demand load curves – an important tool for assessment of PV deployment success

Abstract

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.