Guest Editorial: Emerging Topics of DC–DC Converters for Solar PV

Recent advancements in renewable energy technologies including dramatic improvement in cost-effectiveness and reliability have driven wide deployment of renewable energy sources in the modern electric grid across the globe. Among the renewable energy sources, solar photovoltaic (PV) is the most widely used. For the solar PV system, the dc input of a PV cell, module, string, or array, ranging from sub-1 V to 1500 V, in general, needs to be converted to an intermediate dc voltage by a dc–dc converter(s), for conditioning reliable dc power for grid interface. Thus, the dc–dc conversion greatly affects the entire PV system performance, such as efficiency and reliability among other crucial aspects. To address the critical aspects, many research and development efforts have conducted studies on the dc–dc converters for PV system such as converters with high conversion ratios and high power density and multiport converters to incorporate multiple sources including storage.