Application of stand-alone solar PV system in remote
areas where the grid power cannot reach has been proved
economically feasible. However, the reliability and continuous
service time in a continuous bad weather are the two
key factors influencing the acceptability of this technology.
A high-performance stand-alone solar LED lighting system
was developed by Huang et al. (2010a) for LED lighting.
The system adopts the near-maximum-power-point
operation (nMPPO) concept for the design of photovoltaic
power generation system (Huang et al., 2006) to get rid of
the maximum-power-point-tracking controller (MPPT)
just by properly matching the PV module specification with
the battery voltage to obtain a similar performance of
MPPT. The additional cost, reliability problem, and energy
loss of the MPPT is thus avoided.