The paper presents a new photovoltaic inverter for stand-alone induction motor application. The proposed system is composed of two stages. First stage is for the photovoltaic dc power feeding and second stage is dedicated to the motor-inverter subsystem and control technique. A direct torque control (DTC) with a novel switching strategy for motor torque ripple minimization is introduced. The novel DTC strategy is based on selecting a suitable voltage vector group for motor torque ripple minimization. A three-level voltage source inverter (VSI) is used instead of a two level inverter because the first has more available vectors and lower ripples in the output current and flux than the second, thus it has lower torque ripples. The photovoltaic array and battery bank are sized and the configuration is indicated based on sun-hour methodology. Simulation results show a comparison between three systems; two level VSI with conventional DTC strategy, three level VSI with conventional DTC, and the proposed system that has a novel DTC switching strategy applied to three level VSI. The results show that the proposed system has lower ripples in the current, flux and torque of the motor.