A Study on MPPT for Utility Grid Connected Photovoltaic Systems with Self-Optimizing Method

It is a well-known fact that the dependency of non-renewables sources needs to be reduce to deal with global warming. Solar energy is one such option which is in abundance in India. Solar PV cell are utilised to trap this energy and convert it to electrical energy. The PV cell has the ability to convert near about of 20 % of solar energy to electrical energy. The output of PV cell depends on solar irradiation and panel temperature and panel terminal voltage, based on which MPP can be attained. Hence work is to be done to achieve that point operation for MPPT. This work presents a comparative study between two maximum power point tracking (MPPT) methods in MATLAB/Simulink program that are incremental conductance method and genetic algorithm-based method. The study is performed with variable irradiation and temperature. On simulation, the results obtained are found to give boost converted output voltage of 502.13 V for GA MPPT method and 501.50 V for INC MPPT method. In addition, the output power of boost converter for variable irradiation is found out to be 92.26 KW for GA and 90.41 KW for INC respective only comparison results, GA has clear upper hand over INC method in terms of performance.