New Technique Trends for Power Converters in Distributed Power Generation Systems - Part I

TODAY'S society is increasingly demanding more energy with low environmental impact and high quality and safety of supply. A disturbance caused by variation of energy production from renewables or by the failure of any point in the power grid could have a greater impact on the entire power grid, causing power outages in a large area or even the whole network collapse. The combination of central and distributed power generation systems could reduce energy consumption, and improve system safety and flexibility.
In fact, distributed power generation can continue to supply power in the event of unexpected disasters, and it has become an important complement to the centralized power supply increasing the overall system resiliency. Moreover, the distributed power generation can monitor the quality and performance of regional power in real time. In addition, distributed generation reduces transmission and distribution losses and can reduce or avoid additional transmission and distribution costs. However, there are many problems with the distributed power generation itself, such as system stability, harmonics, and three-phase unbalance. Moreover, the randomness of the generated output power increases the demand variability and can easily cause the grid voltage fluctuation and flicker.
This “Special Section on New Technique Trends for Power Converters in Distributed Power Generation Systems” of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS (TIE) 35 papers selected among 89 submitted papers. Therefore, this Special Section will be published in two parts.
In Part I, all the papers are related to dc/ac grid-tied inverters.