History of maximum power point tracking

Abstract

With time, the conventional fossil fuels for generating electric loads are depleted, so efforts are made to harness PV solar energy to serve the continuously increasing electric loads. The energy conversion efficiency of PV modules is very low, while they are expensive in price. This calls for operating the module at the maximum power point at all operating conditions. There exist numerous maximum power point tracking techniques in today’s market to maintain the operation of PV module at maximum power such as off-line techniques, on-line or hill-climbing (HC) techniques and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. Numerous approaches for improving, adapting, and optimizing these techniques have been published. However, they differ in many aspects such as tracking speed, tracking accuracy, steady-state efficiency and dynamic efficiency, number of sensors used, complexity, and cost. These MPPT techniques fail or deviate from tracking the correct maximum power point (MPP) under sudden or ramp variations of solar irradiation and ambient temperature as well as under partial shading with oscillations around MPP. From 1954 to 2018, all the researchers focused on MPPT, which is the main target of this chapter to follow up the history of development maximum power point tracking in PV systems as well as exploring the advantages and disadvantages of the many proposed MPPT methods in the literature. The history includes the off-line and on-line MPPT techniques along with their improvements as documented in the literature over the period 1954–2018. This chapter is framed as a review chapter.