Abstract

Time-varying environment conditions have significantly influenced operation performance of photovoltaic generation. Partial shading condition is a typical problem which usually increases mismatch losses and reduces output power of photovoltaic array. For large-scale PV power plants, partial shading may affect the efficiency of the entire PV system. To solve this issue, this paper proposes a novel socio-inspired photovoltaic reconfiguration approach, called democratic political algorithm (DPA), which can effectively reduce power losses, improve power generation efficiency and accelerate convergence rate. DPA aims to reconfigure photovoltaic array’s electrical connection to minimize malignant impacts from partial shading condition and then obtain higher-quality output characteristics. Three case studies are carried out to verify the effectiveness and advantages of DPA, together with a thorough comparison of nine typical meta-heuristic algorithms. Simulation results demonstrate that DPA can enhance output power of photovoltaic array by 21.47% for a 10 × 10 (small) PV array, 21.55% for a 15 × 15 (medium) PV array, and 20.98% for a 20 × 20 (large) PV array compared to total cross tied interconnection scheme.