This paper presents a simple technique that efficiently tracks the maximum power from the photovoltaic array and delivers it to the grid. A controller has been developed for interfacing PV array with utility grid through a line commutated inverter. A PIC microcontroller together with the multiplier and opamp signal conditioning circuit has been used for the generation of firing pulses to the SCRs in the inverter. Using adaptive step perturb and observe (P&O) algorithm, the firing angle is automatically adjusted to extract maximum power from the solar PV array, which is fed to the utility grid. The complete closed loop scheme has been modelled and simulated in MATLAB environment and the simulation results are compared with experimental results. A PV array consisting of four panels each rated for 80 W, 21.2 V, 5.17 A has been used for the experiment. It is found that the experimental and simulation results have very close agreement. © Research India Publications.