At present, solar energy resources are becoming more and more popular as a substitute for conventional energy sources, in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In order to further improve the utilization rate of solar energy resources, storage, as an important supplement, is more and more widely used. One of the most important research directions is to determine the necessary size of storage capacity by mathematic modeling. This paper will describe a new and efficient decision-making process to determine a series of storage capacities for a grid-connected PV system. The benefit of using a decision-making model is that it can easily determine the most appropriate storage capacity for the system. The paper will show here that the decision-making model will not only find the most effectiveness storage, but also find the relationship between storage capacities and the utilization rates of renewable energy. The case study shows that using 141.25 kWh storage increases the utilization rate of renewable energy in demand by 3.605%. And it would recover the storage cost by 4.66 years in Australia market. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.