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. Until now, various anti-islanding methods (AIMs) for detecting and preventing islanding of photovoltaic and other distributed generations (DGs) have been proposed. This paper presents an overview of recent anti-islanding method developments for grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) power generation, focusing on the concept and operating principle, mainly based on single phase system. For the performance comparison, the experimental results of the various AIMs with 3 kW PV inverter are provided based on the islanding detection capability and power quality. As a result, the active AIMs have better islanding detection capability rather than the passive one. However, the active AIMs have power quality degradation on harmonic distortion or displacement power factor based on the injected active signal type. In addition to the evaluation and comparison of the main anti-islanding methods, this paper also summarizes the related anti-islanding standards to evaluate anti-islanding capability for PV system. This paper can be used as a useful anti-islanding reference for future work in DG like PV, and wind turbine. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.