Economic competitiveness of solar energy with conventional fuels and electricity

Abstract

Concerns over environment and increased demand of energy have led the world to think about alternate energy sources such as wind, hydro, solar and fuel cells. Out of these, photovoltaic (PV) power generation systems have become increasingly important all over the world due its availability, cleanness, low maintenance cost and inexhaustible nature. But power produced by the photovoltaic system is stochastic in nature due to the variation of solar irradiation and cell temperature throughout the day. In order to track the varying power, a DC-DC converter with maximum power point tracker (MPPT) is used. Different MPPT algorithms have been proposed for tracking peak power from the PV panel. Selection of adequate DC-DC converter is also an important factor since it has an influence on overall performance of the PV system. This paper presents a comparative study on the characteristics of different non-isolated DC-DC converters and highlights the various research works that has been done on DC-DC converters based MPPT PV system. Study shows that selection of converter also has an impact on the overall performance of the PV system. Based on the survey and comparative study, selection criteria to choose DC-DC converter for PV system is described in this paper.