Abstract Partial shading conditions (PSC) are unavoidable and are the main reason for the reduction in power from a photovoltaic (PV) array. With proper arrangement, the impact of PSC can be somewhat mitigated. There are distinct types of configurations, including series, parallel, series-parallel (SP), honeycomb, total cross-tied (TCT), etc. This article presents a novel SP–TCT configuration to maximize output power from PV panels under different shading conditions. The proposed configuration performance has been examined considering a 4 × 4 PV array under long-narrow and long-wide, short-narrow, short-wide and uniform shading conditions. The results of the proposed configurations are compared with existing configurations in terms of performance measures such as maximum power, fill factor, efficiency and mismatch losses. In all the cases, performance of the proposed configuration is nearer to the TCT configuration performance. The percentage improvement in terms of efficiency for the proposed novel SP–TCT configuration and TCT configuration is nearly 1.6% compared to other methods.