IEEE Power Electronics Magazine - June 2020 - 4

From the Editor

by Ashok Bindra

Can Power Electronics Enable an
Energy-Storage-Based Society?

lthough the coronavirus pandemic has changed the world,
hurting millions of people
and the global economy, the struggle
to defeat this monster continues.
The manner in which countries are
working together to eliminate a common enemy shows that there is light
at the end of the tunnel. God bless
those brave medical and health-care
professionals on the front lines, saving lives and giving hope to the millions of families. Like many others,
the IEEE and the IEEE Power Electronics Society (PELS) are also going
through a transformation that will
ultimately be good for the professional community. Meanwhile, as we pray
and work together for speedy recovery from this calamity, workers like
me feel lucky to be safe, healthy, and
productive. Thanks to the Internet,
online tools are enabling us to continue writing and processing content
for IEEE Power Electronics Magazine. As a result, this issue, where the
focus is on integrated battery storage systems, was not in danger of
being delayed.
In the first article of this issue,
"Emerging Opportunities in Distributed Power Electronics and Battery
Integration," Prof. Issa Batarseh and
Khalil Alluhaybi show that substantial improvement in battery technology and storage-in terms of cost, efDigital Object Identifier 10.1109/MPEL.2020.2984292
Date of current version: 16 June 2020

IEEE POWER ELECTRONICS MAGAZINE

ficiency, and reliability-is paving the
way for a new electric-energy-storage
revolution that is transforming the
grid as we know it. As a result, the integration of renewable sources with
batteries, power electronics, and protection will disrupt the current methods for generating, distributing, and
consuming energy in the same manner that refrigeration disrupted the
world's production, distribution, and
consumption of food. Additionally, as
per this article, new storage systems
and integration methods promise to
bring about a significant paradigm
shift in power electronics technology,
widely extending its application reach.
The authors suggest that it is now
possible to safely and reliably integrate photovoltaic panel, battery, and
power electronics with protection in
a single module, ushering in a new
era with opportunities for practical,
smart-distributed renewable solutions
in both grid and off-grid connected applications.
In the December 2019 issue of the
magazine, we published a few session
summaries of talks presented at the
10th IEEE Future of Electronic Power
Processing and Conversion (FEPPCON X). They included sessions on
batteries as energy storage technology, the power electronics system view
of energy storage, and new technology
and solutions needed for high-power
applications, along with the keynote
talk on global climate change. In the
second part of that series, we bring

z June 2020

four more summaries from FEPPCON
X. They are "The Future of Control and
Communication," by Prof. Rolando
Burgos and Prof. Jian Sun, "Power
Electronics Design Methods and Automation in the Digital Era," by Prof. Antonio J. Marques Cardoso, "The Future
of Power Electronics Circuits," by Prof.
Robert Pilawa-Podgurski, and "Energy
Access," by Prof. Jelena Popovic.
The next feature, "Space Mapping
for Codesigned Magnetics," by Kristen
Booth and John Bandler, describes
techniques such as codesign and
space mapping to realize more advanced magnetic design. In essence,
it shows that by combining these two
techniques, the engineer can optimally design a high-frequency transformer that meets electrical and mechanical constraints.
In the fourth feature article, "On
Power Scalability of Modular Multilevel Converters," Stefan Milovanovic and Prof. Drazen Dujic present
a method for extending the power
capacity of modular multilevel converters (MMCs) by paralleling its subbranches (SBRs). The proposed control method enables the balancing of
energies among the converter SBRs
while keeping their currents partially
balanced at all times. Currently, the
researchers are finalizing the MMC
platform, which will be used to support research activities like the ones
presented in their article.
Finally, the feature article "APEC
Organizers, Vendors Take Virtual Route

IEEE Power Electronics Magazine - June 2020

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