Trend of photovoltaic applications: A power electronics perspective

Nowadays EU countries show an installed capacity of about 90 GW and in 2013 PV has already provided about 2.7% of Europe's electricity needs. Looking forward, it is possible to estimate that in 2030 PV could supply up to 15% of the overall electricity demand in the EU, about 7 times more than today reaching an installed power of over 440 GW by 2020. In the past, such amazing growth has been mainly supported by national feed-in tariffs but recently these have been largely reduced or stopped. In fact, the costs of electrical energy from PV have been reduced by about 90% in the last two decades and the grid-parity has been already reached in many EU countries. Indeed such results are due to improved solar cell manufacturing but also to PV-Inverters that must fulfill many requirements such as high efficiency, high reliability and low costs. Today converters technology needs to keep up and new principles of PV energy conversion may open up new opportunities. In the presentation the emerging issues concerning PV energy conversion will be discussed: Application of SiC and GaN devices in PV converters. — Traditional vs innovative topologies. — PV-module integrated converters. — Energy storage issues. — Ancillary service. — New approaches needed to reduce the system costs even further.