Abstract
Maintaining a stable electricity supply is of utmost importance for both businesses and communities. However, the growing demand for electricity coupled with insufficient generation capacity presents challenges to South Africa’s. Load shedding, a controlled reduction of electricity supply, is implemented to prevent grid overload and blackouts. Unfortunately, load shedding has become a common occurrence, leading to disruptions and economic losses. Furthermore, cable theft exacerbates the situation by causing additional breakdowns and reducing generation capacity. To address these issues, incorporating solar systems into the domestic electricity supply chain is proposed as a solution. This study focuses on designing a system that combines solar power with the existing electricity infrastructure to minimize the impact of load shedding. The design process involves capturing accurate solar radiation patterns, considering factors like dust, temperature, shadows, and humidity. Through the utilization of a photovoltaic panel connected to an Arduino UNO analog input, the system's sizing and monitoring were successfully carried out. The microcontroller was programmed using Arduino IDE software to collect battery charging patterns continuously. The collected radiation patterns were analyzed, and the concept of peak sun hours (PSH) is calculated. These PSH values, along with load shedding data and the estimated number of South African homeowners, were used to size three off-grid power systems. An online application was employed for the sizing process, and SAURAN records were used to validate the laboratory results and compare radiation levels among different provinces in South Africa. Cost analysis was conducted to compare the total system costs with existing coal stations. The results demonstrate that the system was capable of powering lighter loads not exceeding 400W. By aggregating the lighter loads from 18 million houses, it is possible to prevent stage 8 load shedding for 2 hours and stage 1 load shedding for 16 hours. In conclusion, this study proposes the incorporation of solar systems into the domestic electricity supply chain to reduce the occurrence of load shedding. The design and analysis process, along with experimental results, highlight the potential of this hybrid system to provide more reliable and sustainable complementary electricity in South Africa.