Guest Editorial Special Section on Innovative Research Concepts for Power Delivery Engineering

The papers included in this special section focus on research and development in the area of power delivery systems. Power delivery has occupied an important part of electrical engineering since the inception of the electrical age over 100 years ago. In recent years, the appearance of a number of new technologies has intensified interest and spurred new challenges in power delivery. Perhaps, the greatest impetus in the field has come from the promotion of the Smart Grid objectives and the proliferation of distributed energy resources. The organizers of this special section deliberated and conjectured on the trajectory of power delivery research, the potential impact of research activities in technologies germane to power delivery, and the avenues for accelerating the acceptance of particularly promising and worthwhile technologies. Electric power and energy engineering is driven by growth, policy, economics, and new ideas in engineering. The latter driver, namely the new ideas, is actually elements of research in transmission and distribution engineering. This special section deals with innovative topics, considered in the long term, for research in power delivery engineering.