Decentralisation of power generation is generally
acknowledged one of characteristics of future smart
grids. Different conventional and renewable energy
sources will be installed in different locations but
supporting the common grid network. The energy
sources will work separately but with communication
to optimize the power flow in the grids. Currently,
solar energy is the most commonly used among the
renewable energy sources, since installation of PV
panel is very flexible, it can be down to few kilowatts
for residential applications or up to tens Megawatts for
solar farms. However, the disadvantage is that solar
energy harvesting only operates during day time, and
the amount of extracting energy highly depends on the
weather conditions. It creates power quality issues for
the future smart grids due to this unpredictable energy
flows. Furthermore, emerging semiconductors is
getting close to the market. The design of PV inverters
will be a new era to achieve high energy efficiency and
reliable. The paper will present the challenges of the
future PV inverter design based on the gridenvironment,
the regulations and the applications.
Moreover, the technology trend of improving system
performance of PV inverters, including
semiconductors, magnetic materials and converter
topology, will be reviewed and discussed.