In this paper, an effective strategy is presented to realize IGBT open-circuit fault diagnosis for closed-loop cascaded photovoltaic (PV) grid-connected inverters. The approach is based on the analysis of the inverter output voltage time waveforms in healthy and faulty conditions. It is mainly composed of two parts. The first part is to select the similar faults based on Euclidean distance and set the specific labels. The second part is the classification based on Principal Component Analysis and Support Vector Machine. The classification is done in two steps. In the first, similar faults are grouped to do the preliminary diagnosis of all fault types. In the second step the similar faults are discriminated. Compared with existing fault diagnosis strategies for several fundamental periods and under different external environments, the proposed strategy has better robustness and higher fault diagnosis accuracy. The effectiveness of the proposed fault diagnosis strategy is assessed through simulation results.