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Abstract Conventional energy resources are facing many challenges such as increasing cost, limited quantities, supply security, climate change, and negative impacts on humans’ health. Therefore, reliance on renewable energy resources such as solar, wind, tidal, geothermal and biomass power for electrical power generation has become indispensable. Reliance on Photo Voltaic (PV) generation stations is one of the quickest solutions to support the electric grid without using traditional resources for generating electricity because they have short design and installation time. Also, the reduction in the cost of PV system components make it competitive resource for electricity generation. Egypt is one of the promising countries for electrical power production from renewable energy resources especially from solar. The sun brightness rate in Egypt is from 9 to 11 hours per day throughout the year, which allows higher capacity factors for solar PV generating stations. The Egyptian ministry of electricity aims to produce about 20 % of Egypt’s electrical power from renewable energy resources especially solar by 2022. Therefore, Egypt is building a 2 GW PV generating station in Benban, Aswan, which is the largest PV generating station in the world up to this date. The operation of large PV generating stations in Egypt faces a main challenge, which is the accumulation of dust on the PV arrays. Dust causes significant power losses in high power PV generating stations due to partial shading. Partial Shading (PS) increases the power losses in PV arrays significantly. Consequently, PS is considered one of the biggest challenges that face the operation of PV systems. PV arrays dynamic reconfiguration is a promising technique used to reduce PS losses. This thesis presents the Water Cycle Algorithm (WCA) with the purpose of PV array reconfiguration to reduce PS power losses. WCA is an optimization technique its idea is inspired from water cycle in nature. The execution time of the proposed algorithm is shorter than the existing algorithms when dealing with large PV arrays under irregular partial shading patterns. |