Special Section on Power Electronics-Enabled Smart Power Distribution Grid

Economic and environmental constraints, as well as technological advancements, are reshaping the traditional view of power distribution systems. In a future distribution grid, as the number of inverter- and converter-based devices increases to more than hundreds of thousands, it is rather intuitive that the current state-of-the-art technical solutions and industry practices will no longer be effective. While tremendous progress has been made in advancing smart grid solutions, not much attention has been paid to bridging the gap between two traditionally disjointed research areas—power systems (especially distribution systems) and power electronics—that will ultimately facilitate the vision of 100% penetration of power-electronics-based distributed energy resources coming to fruition. There is a growing interest in the concepts of power electronics-enabled power systems around the world. This Special Section invites a broad spectrum of contributors (e.g., academics, researchers, engineers, consultants, market regulators and system operators, key policymakers) to define and develop the interdisciplinary technical approaches collectively. Although there are many technical challenges associated with making this vision a reality, policy, economic, and workforce issues also play a significant role. This Special Section hence concentrates on discussing various relevant topics associated with how to accommodate extremely high levels of power-electronics-based distributed energy resources to promote economic efficiency; improve social welfare; reduce energy cost; support plug-and-play of distributed renewable energy; and improve the capability, adaptability, scalability, resiliency, safety, security, and usability that our electric power distribution infrastructure can provide. The articles are authored by a diverse group of experts from academics, industry, and national laboratories around the world (
Fig. 1
). The guest editorial board received 120+ abstract submissions and invited 65 of them for full-paper submissions. After two-round rigorous reviews, 23 papers have been accepted for final publication. It is worth noting that this Special Section places an emphasis on addressing the mutual research interests of academics and industry. Hence, interdisciplinary research and real-world-problem-driven research topics are of particular relevance to this Special Section. The guest editorial board and IEEE PES leadership made tremendous efforts to attract authors from the industry. All the papers have gone through the same review criteria. Approximately 35% of the accepted papers are led or co-led by industry experts.