Nowadays, renewable power system solutions are widely investigated for residential applications. Grid-connected systems including energy storage elements are designed. Advanced research is actually focused on improving the reliability and energy density of renewable systems reducing the whole utility cost. Source and load modeling, power architectures and algorithms are only a few topics to be addressed. Designers have to carefully deal with each subtopic prior to design efficient renewable energy systems. In the literature, each topic is separately discussed and the lack of a unique reference guide is clear to power electronics designers. In this paper, each design step including source and load modeling, hybrid supply architectures and power algorithms, is carefully addressed. A review of existing solutions is presented. The correlation between each topic is deeply analyzed. Guidelines for system design are given. This paper can be referenced as a detailed review of renewable energy system design issues and solutions. Copyright (C) 2013, Hydrogen Energy Publications, LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.