OWER SYSTEMS are going through a paradigm change from centralized generation to distributed generation and further onto smart grid. A huge number of relatively small distributed energy resources (DERs), including wind farms, solar farms, electric vehicles and energy storage systems, and flexible loads are being integrated into power systems through power electronic converters. This imposes great challenges to the stability, scalability, reliability, security and resiliency of future power systems. Field experience in recent years has shown that large-scale deployment of DERs affects the stability of current power systems, which are dominated by synchronous machines (SMs). It is vital to develop appropriate control architecture and technologies so that all these different players are able to take part in the regulation of future power systems in an autonomous and responsible way. During the last decade, significant developments have been made to operate power electronic converters as virtual synchronous machines (VSMs), which offers a promising way for all the DERs and flexible loads to follow the same mechanism of conventional synchrounous machines. Other techniques have been proposed or are under study. The objective of this special section is to join the forces of the communities of control/systems theory, power electronics and power systems to address from a practical point of view various emerging issues of power-electronics-enabled autonomous power systems and pave the way for large-scale deplolyment of DERs and flexible loads. Editors invite original manuscripts presenting recent advances in these fields with special reference to the following topics and their implementation:
['Qing-Chang Zhong', 'Frede Blaabjerg', 'Carlo Cecati']
Power-electronics-enabled Autonomous Power Systems