A comparative study of central and distributed MPPT architectures for megawatt utility and large scale commercial photovoltaic plants

In this paper different distributed PV architectures are studied from an energy yield perspective. These distributed architectures are applied to massively paralleled thin film plants employing high voltage PV modules, mc-Si plants with long series strings of low voltage modules and plants with medium voltage thin film modules in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the distributed architecture in each case. The effects of partial shading, module mismatch and cable losses are quantified in order to obtain the energy yield for each of the architectures under study. The results of this trade-off study are used to quantify the benefits of a distributed architecture as well as determine the optimal location of the dc/dc converters that perform the MPPT function.