ABSTRACT
A sample village with 100 households in a ratal area of Thailand is selected for design of a solar home system, a photovoltaic (PV) battery charging station and a centralised mini-grid system. This paper focuses on the design and analytical evaluation of three main PV system types for a Thai rural village. This is based on climatic data at the design location, daily load demand, I-V characteristic of a solar module and so on. The daily electrical energy needs of a village can be broadly split into three categories, namely (a) for each household, (b) for community centre and (c) for public use. Analytical comparisons of each PV system type in terms of system cost and possible problems for using in typical rural villages of Thailand have been addressed.
