In this study, a new inertial power based perturb and observe method is proposed for wind turbines by considering the energy stored in the turbine inertia, which enables to find the maximum power point accurately. The proposed structure eliminates the problems of sluggish performance and wrong directionality existed in the conventional perturb and observe. In addition, fast and precise tracking of maximum power point by the generator, implying the tracking performance, is also essential to improve the turbine efficiency. In the classical maximum power tracking control, the exact model knowledge is used, which deteriorates the tracking performance and hence the efficiency. Thus, the third order super twisting sliding mode is also applied to the control of the generator to enhance the tracking performance. There is only one parameter used as a priori knowledge in the overall control system, the turbine inertia. To decide the increment in the efficiency, a comparison is performed between the classical and proposed maximum power tracking control systems. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed control system provides an 9.55% increase in the efficiency with respect to the classical one. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.