Enhanced Reconfiguration Method for Reducing Mismatch Losses in PV Systems

In addition to energy losses produced by mistracking the global power peak, partially shaded PV systems are susceptible to extra power losses due to power mismatch in their series-connected PV modules. Reconfiguring of PV modules in a PV system has been referred to as an effective method for minimizing these losses. Unfortunately, the available reconfiguration methods that are accurate need lengthy computational time to determine the optimal configuration, which impedes their practical realization in large PV systems. In this paper, a reconfiguration technique is presented that finds the optimal configuration in a reduced computational time. Unlike the existing methods, the proposed method utilizes the greedy optimization principle to derive a simple strategy that can find the optimal PV configuration without the need to solve heavy dynamic programming problems. The benefits of the proposed method are verified with respect to the existing methods under various shading scenarios. Furthermore, a case study on a large PV system is conducted demonstrating that the achieved computational time reduction can reduce the mismatch power losses in partially shaded PV systems.