Power Electronics for Renewable and Conventional Energy Systems

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Advances in electrical and electronic technology (EET) have revolutionized society in ways that were unimaginable only a few years ago. Advances in consumer electronics, computational power, data storage and global networking have facilitated significant quality-of-life improvements that are now taken for granted - from the mundane, such as online banking and office communications, to the miraculous, such as medical breakthroughs and economic globalization. EET is essential to the functioning of industry, academia, government and society at large. The amount of energy needed to power and maintain the infrastructure needed for this technology, however, is considerable and is expected to increase exponentially as society becomes even more dependent on EET and energy consumption continues to skyrocket. There are two general approaches that can be taken to address the problem of escalating energy needs that threaten to overtake available energy capacity. The first is to increase energy capacity, but there is little appetite in today's society to invest in the construction of new conventional energy sources such as coal plants due to environmental concerns and renewable energy solutions such as solar and wind are considered to be more attractive in a modern and environmentally conscious society. The second approach is to improve the energy efficiency of today's technology, in order to "squeeze" as much energy as possible from existing energy sources while minimizing inefficiencies. The proposed project seeks to consider solutions that take into account both approaches by proposing advances to renewable energy systems and energy utilization with respect to their power electronics. New and improved power converters for renewable energy systems will be developed and researched as a means to help increase their energy capacity and new and improved converters for conventional energy systems will be developed and researched as a means to reduce energy waste. The novelty will be in the originality and improvement in cost and/or efficiency of the proposed alternatives to existing converters. Cost and complexity will be reduced by using topologies that require fewer active switches, efficiency will be increased using techniques that reduce the power lost in the converter switches when they are being turned on and off with high frequency, performance will be improved by the development of novel architectures that take advantage of the new building block converters that will be developed. The research will be focused on solar and wind renewable energy systems and on ac-dc converter interfaces for conventional energy systems as well as for renewable energy systems, as part of microgrid and smart grid technology. The proposed research will help strengthen Canadian capabilities in renewable energy systems and train highly qualified personnel – 3 PhD students, 4 Master's and 2 undergraduate students - to develop multidisciplinary skills for the 21st century.