Dynamic Performance Analysis of a 30kW PV System using P&O-Based Maximum Power Point Tracking

In this paper a detailed dynamic performance analysis of a 30-kW PV system using Perturb and Observe (P&O) maximum power point tracking (MPPT) algorithm is presented. As solar PV is increasingly integrated into today’s power networks, good MPPT is critical to harnessing maximum power. Although simple and inexpensive to implement, conventional P&O has a few significant disadvantages: oscillations around the maximum power point, loss of the direction of the power point tracking with fast changes in the solar irradiance, and compromising the direction of the tracking to speed up and increase the accuracy of the tracking. The proposed system is composed of PV array, DC-DC boost converter and P&O controller. The results of the simulations are compared and studied under the assumption of step changes in irradiance and load. The dynamic performance parameters like convergence time, oscillations under steady state condition, tracking efficiency and power quality are studied in detail. From the results presented, the performance of the standard P&O algorithm in steady state error tracking performance is good, while the performance in terms of dynamic response is limited, so there is a need to improve the performance of the dynamic response by using better variants of the P&O algorithm to achieve good performance in practice.