•Various technical, economic, social and environmental parameters are covered.•Storage opportunities for energy management in IRES are presented.•Control schemes to obtain a regulated power supply in IRES are described.•Different methods for size optimization of an integrated system are discussed.•Open issues and solutions in design and development of IRES are summarized. In the current energy scenario, harnessing of renewable energy potential is considered as a promising solution to address the issues of rise in earth’s temperature, environment pollution, increase in demand and scarcity of fossil fuels. Renewable sources such as biomass, solar radiation, wind speed, and small hydro are the best alternatives of fossil fuel-based sources. Accordingly, this research paper focuses on the comprehensive review of different issues associated with the Integrated Renewable Energy System (IRES) i.e. storage options, modelling, design parameters, unit sizing methodologies and control schemes. Different storage options available are presented which are required to cater the stochastic nature of renewable sources especially solar and wind. Further, different technical, economical, social and environmental parameters considered during the design of IRES are studied in the paper. Various states of the unit size methodologies to obtain the sizes of IRES are described. Furthermore, control schemes to regulate the power output of intermittent sources are also investigated. Finally, several open challenging issues and their possible solutions related to the design of IRES have been discussed.