This paper presents a new single phase grid connected cascaded multilevel inverter with minimum number of switches for photovoltaic (PV) based power conversion systems along with Evolutionary Programming (EP) based Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) algorithm. The projected inverter can output more number of voltage levels with minimum number of switching devices. The number of gate driving circuit is reduced, which leads to the diminution of size and power consumption in the driving circuits. The THD of the output waveform is reduced. The proposed inverter is driven by the mixture modulation technique. In this paper, the circuit configuration, theoretical operation and simulation results with MATLAB/SIMULINK are also shown. The EP based MPPT is capable of extracting maximum power from the PV array. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.