Role of Power Electronics in Renewable Energy Resources
Ayesha Mughal
Department of Electrical Engineering
University Engineering And Technology
Lahore Faisalabad Campus Pakistan
Ayeshazahid489@gmail.com
Abstract
The swift increase in global energy consumption
and greater demand of people and the impact of
greenhouse gas emissions has accelerated the
evolution towards greener energy sources. The need
for distributed generation (DG) employing
renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and
fuel cells has gained significant thrust. This paper
presents explanation for the usage and importance
of Power Electronics converters in the field of the
renewable energy. Generation of renewable energy
has two important ways to get the Energy, the 1 st
is the photovoltaic (Solar cells) the other is the wind
mills (sometimes called wind turbines). Both of
the methods use different type of Power electronics
converters. In this paper the types of
converters used in both systems are explained
which are mainly DC-DC boost converters, DC-AC
inverters, AC-DC rectifiers. The importance of the
DC-AC and AC-DC converters is explained through
the paper in addition to a full analysis for a DC-DC
boost converter.
I. INTRODUCTION
Renewable energy systems are systems of high
importance as they produce electrical energy from
non fossil sources. The production of such energy
independent of fossil became a must as the
consuming of fossil resources caused pollution to
the environmental exhaustion of fossil sources that
are almost completely drained. The production of
renewable energy is based on the idea of converting
a type of energy mostly mechanical energy and
solar energy into electrical energy. The most
appealing two types of renewable energy sources
are photovoltaic which transform the solar energy
into DC electrical energy and wind turbines which
transform mechanical energy resulting from the
spinning of the turbine by wind into AC electrical
energy. Both of the methods require the usage of
Power electronics converters to control frequency
and magnitude of the current resultant from the
conversion between energies.
Wind Energy: Producing renewable energy using
wind mills have a growth rate of 30% during the
years from 2004 till 2014.Wind turbines in general
have two modes of operation. The 1st one is the
fixed speed where the turbine is designed to operate
with high efficiency on a certain single speed it is a
cheap technology but lacks the ability to work
efficiently when speed of wind change. The second
type is variable speed where the turbine works with
high efficiency on a wide range of speeds. The
trade-off of this type is that it’s relatively expensive
and the design of the turbine is more complex [3].
Working on variable set of speed in both types
produces after conversion between mechanical and
electrical energy produces currents with variable
and random frequencies as there is a relation
between the rate of change of position (angular
frequency) of the turbine and the frequency of the
AC current so to produce a n AC current with the
desired magnitude and frequency a rectifier is used
to transform the AC current into DC then a DC
boost converter is used to achieve a higher
magnitude and at the end an inverter is used to
transform the DC current into AC current with the
desired frequency as shown in fig.1.
Solar Energy: Another source to produce clean
energy is the photovoltaic power generation system
which produces a DC current by converting heat
resultant from the solar Energy. The photovoltaic
arrays can be used in wide range of applications like
battery charging, water pumping, vehicles, satellite
power systems, grid-connected power systems,
standalone power systems. The main disadvantage
of the photovoltaic arrays is its low conversion
efficiency. To overcome this problem of PV arrays
DC-DC booster converter are used to increase the II-Simulation & Results:
magnitude of the produced electrical DC energy
that allows the photovoltaic arrays to extract the
maximum possible power for increasing the
utilization rate of the photovoltaic arrays. After
getting the desired magnitude of the DC current a
DC-AC inverter is used to interface the current with
the required frequency of the load [4].

Figure 1: Three Phase AC-DC rectifier

Boost Converter: As mentioned before the DC-

DC boost converter is one of the essential keys in an
efficient renewable power system. It has the ability
to control the DC magnitude of the electrical current
resultant from the system. The basic description of
the boost converter that it is a step-up power
converter that takes in a low voltage input and
provides an output at a much higher voltage by the
usage of an inductor that increases the output
Figure 2: Output waveform of rectifier
voltage [9]

Figure 3: Boost Converter


Figure 4: output of boost converter
Figure 5: DC-AC Three phase Inverter
Figure 6: output of inverter
III- Conclusions:
Renewable energy systems are a crucial need that
develops and will be needed all over the world to
replace the Fossil energy. The power electronic
converters are the main key to obtain efficient
conversion of energy and maximize the output. It’s
needed to have further researching in the area of
maximizing the conversion between the energies,
stabilizing the output of the renewable energy
systems and in the area of the inverters DC-AC in
order to get output with pure sinusoidal wave of
desired frequency.
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