PV generating sources are one of the most promising power generation systems in today’s power scenario. The inherent potential barrier that PV possesses with respect to irradiation and temperature is its nonlinear power output characteristics. An intelligent power tracking scheme, e.g., maximum power point tracking (MPPT), is mandatorily employed to increase the power delivery of a PV system. The MPPT schemes experiences severe setbacks when the PV is even shaded partially as PV exhibits multiple power peaks. Therefore, the search mechanism gets deceived and gets stuck with the local maxima. Hence, a rational search mechanism should be developed, which will find the global maxima for a partially shaded PV. The conventional techniques like fractional open circuit voltage (FOCV), hill climbing (HC) method, perturb and observe (P&O), etc., even in their modified versions, are not competent enough to track the global MPP (GMPP). Nature-inspired and bio-inspired MPPT techniques have been proposed by the researchers to optimize the power output of a PV system during partially shaded conditions (PSCs). This paper reviews, compares, and analyzes them. This article renders firsthand information to those in the field of research, who seek interest in the performance enhancement of PV system during inhomogeneous irradiation. Each algorithm has its own advantages and disadvantages in terms of convergence speed, coding complexity, hardware compatibility, stability, etc. Overall, the authors have presented the logic of each global search MPPT algorithms and its comparisons, and also have reviewed the performance enhancement of these techniques when these algorithms are hybridized.

An autonomous power generation system (APGS) contains units such as diesel energy generator, solar photovoltaic units, wind turbine generator and fuel cells along with energy-storing units such as the flywheel energy storage system and battery energy storage system. The components either run at lower/higher power output or may turn on/off at different instants of their operation. Due to this, the conventional controllers will not provide desired performance under varied load conditions. This paper proposes an adaptive fuzzy logic PID (AFPID) controller for load frequency control. In order to achieve an improved performance, a modified whale optimization algorithm (mWOA) was also proposed in this paper for tuning of the AFPID parameters. The proposed algorithm was first evaluated using standard test functions and compared with other recent algorithms to authenticate the competence of algorithm. The proposed mWOA algorithm outperforms PSO, GSA, DE and FEP algorithms in five out of seven unimodal test functions and four out of six multimodal test functions. The effectiveness of the AFPID compared with the conventional PID and the proposed AFPID provides better performance. Reduction of 39.13% in error criteria (objective function) compared with WOA-PID controller. The proposed approach was also compared with some recently proposed frequency control approaches in a widely used two-area test system.