Abstract:
Historically, there has been a tremendous increase in renewable energy resource research due to
ambitious aspirations of supplying clean, inexpensive energy; nonetheless, an estimated 771
million people in developing nations lack access to electricity. Pakistan's total solar irradiation is
around 5.5 x 1014 kWh per year, with an average of 10 hours of sunlight per day. Studies also
suggest that Pakistan has the potential to produce solar power of 2.9 million MW in total. Gridconnected PV system allows the consumer to produce electrical energy as needed and transmit
excess electrical energy to grid stations via a bidirectional billing mechanism. The goal of this
research study is to motivate photovoltaic system utilization through roof-top grid connected PV
systems to achieve maximum power and reduced cost on billing. A survey questionnaire was
designed to collect electricity demand of residents from Rawalpindi and Islamabad. The average
hourly demand for different seasons of the year were clustered using K-means clustering. System
Advisor Model (SAM) software was used to simulate an optimum grid connected PV system. The
optimization criteria selected for each cluster and all the debt-to-equity scenarios was Internal Rate
of Return (IRR). The optimum system is the one that achieves the highest IRR for the highest PV
system for each cluster under each debt scenario. Therefore, 4.405 KW for Cluster 1, 8.205 KW
for Cluster 2 and 6.154 KW for Cluster 3. The average electricity bill was reduced to almost
93.32% over the project lifespan for Cluster 1, 85.32% for Cluster 2 and 89.01% for Cluster 3.
