Islanding phenomenon is undesirable because it leads to a safety hazard to utility service personnel and may cause damage to power generation and power supply facilities as a result of unsynchronized re-closure. In order to prevent the phenomenon, various anti-islanding methods have been studied. Until now, frequency or start phase shift methods of inverter current have much attention as active anti-islanding methods, which cause reactive power variation to the utility. However, these methods deteriorate usually the power quality like power factor or harmonic performance. This paper proposes a high power quality active anti-islanding method using effective power variation, which is implemented by periodically increasing/decreasing variation of inverter current magnitude. If it causes the large variation of inverter output voltage after islanding, active frequency drift (AFD) method as a simple anti-islanding method will be injected into the inverter current for a designed period and islanding can be detected. In case of large voltage variation when the grid is connected, AFD method will be removed after the designed period. Unlike most active anti-islanding method deteriorating power quality, the proposed method will have high performance of islanding detection and good power quality. For the verification of the proposed method, simulated results and experimental results in addition to analysis are presented using a 3 kW PV inverter. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.