About the publication

The recent trend in the falling price of the solar PV has made solar PV based electricity less expensive than the grid in many of the developing countries. In this project, we proposed to develop a grid integrated solar PV based cooking system which will be low cost and environment friendly solution requiring minimum possible change in habit for the users. We thought of an inverter-less system to get rid of the inverter, one of the costly components, to keep the energy cost low. The cooking system was designed to work with DC voltage and solar PV is integrated to grid in such a way that it operates close to the maximum power point. The electronics is designed to give priority to the PV power while cooking and any short-fall in power is compensated by the grid.

Although, we used DC voltage as the input to the appliances connected to our cooking system, we ensured that our system is compatible with the appliances readily available in the market and no modification is required while using them. So, we tested hotplates, induction cookers and Electric Pressure Cookers with our system and found that all of them worked well under DC voltage environment without the necessity for any modification. The final version of the control circuit is developed to produce variable DC voltage at the output so that the power delivery to the cooking appliance can be varied as per requirement.