Effect of Shading on the Performance of Solar Photovoltaic System

Solar energy is a sustainable option for supplying energy needs, unlike fossil fuels, it does not exhaust natural resources or release damaging greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. When large solar panels are integrated to the grid, the variation of power output of the solar panels drastically affects the grid stability. Shading is one of the main reasons for this fluctuation in solar PV power. A momentary shading of solar panels can cause high dynamics in the system stability. This paper mainly focuses on the impact of shading on the photovoltaic panels under different operating conditions of temperature and irradiance variations. By modelling the system in MATLAB/Simulink for several PV configurations, such as series, parallel, and series-parallel, the performance is examined. The simulation results shows that the dynamics caused by partial shading has large impacts on the performance of the solar PV panels