Performance Evaluation of Solar Home Systems in Hot Climate Condition:

In solar electrification system charger controller is one the balance of system (BOS) equipments that has major impact to the performance of the system especially in small system like Solar Home System (SHS). Thailand's mega-project 200,000 SHS's consist of two types of PV module assemblied or made in Thailand, multi-crystalline silicon PV (mc-Si) and amorphous silicon PV (a-Si), which use different type of charge controller. The system with multi-crystalline silicon (mc-Si) PV module use PWM or On-Off charger controller while amorphous silicon (a-Si) PV module use DC-DC converter or DC-DC converter with maximum power point tracker (MPPT) charge controller. The energy yield performance of these two systems could be different which make the daily energy produced to be consumed by user of these system are different. The over consume of energy in SHS users lead to system unbalanced and system fail finally. In this paper two SHS's, mc-Si PV module with PWM charger controller and a-Si PV module with MPPT charge controller are set up in Bangkok with other BOS equipment which consisted of deep cycle battery, modify sine wave inverter and resistive load, to evaluate energy yield performance of two type of SHS's in hot climate condition such as Thailand. 1