Comparison of Perturb & Observe and Hill Climbing MPPT Schemes for PV Plant Under Cloud Cover and Varying Load

This paper entails the performance comparison of the Perturb and Observe (P&O) as well as the Hill Climbing (HC) maximum power point tracking (MPPT) techniques for photovoltaic (PV) systems. The system is simulated in MATLAB/Simulink under fast and slow cloud cover variation and distinct loading conditions. It has been found that the HC MPPT scheme performs better than the P&O scheme under slow and fast variation of cloud cover. Under fast cloud cover, the HC scheme can track up to 97.9% of the maximum PV module output power, while the P&O can track up to 85.31% of the maximum PV module output power. Moreover, the HC MPPT scheme tracks more PV module output power when operating under distinct loading conditions and enables for more active power to be delivered to the load, when compared to the P&O MPPT scheme.