Recent advances in efficient and reliable photovoltaic systems

Renewable energies, particularly photovoltaic sources, are more often used together with the classical ones in order to have a local production that cut down the use of classical fuels and improves the reliability of the supplying. Such grid-connected applications fix mandatory constraints to power electronic converters in order to meet power quality specifications and to draw the maximum power conversion from the renewable energy into the electrical one. On the other side, stand-alone applications of renewable energies are gaining an increasing interest due to the spread of portable systems for telecommunications, remote sensing, military apparatuses, aerospace applications, etc. In the context of renewable energies, photovoltaic energy is the most promising due to the low environmental impact, the need of no maintenance after installation are encouraging perspectives in terms of costs and efficiencies. In this paper a review of the advances in the field of "Efficient and reliable photovoltaic systems" is proposed. The starting point is the Special Section entitled Efficient and reliable photovoltaic systems and published in the IEEE Trans actions on Industrial Electronics, Vol.56, No. 11, November 2009, the Guest Editors being Giovanni Spagnuolo, Giovanni Petrone, Massimo Vitelli, Remus Teodorescu and Mummadi Veerachary. Twenty-three papers were published and many of them have received up to now between ten and twenty citations. In particular, the number of citations per paper and per year for this Special Section is 6.84.