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Sustainable Electrical Engineering and PV Microgrids

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Energy Sustainability".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 1 December 2025 | Viewed by 896

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Valladolid, 47011 Valladolid, Spain
Interests: electrical engineering; renewable energies; data science, and optimization applied to energy management; electrical equipment diagnosis
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The growth in installed power from renewable energy sources has emerged from several key factors, such as environmental concerns, energy security, and multiple localized benefits. Technological advancements have significantly reduced the cost of renewable energy systems, particularly photovoltaic energy, boosting competitive power generation for a more sustainable environment within the whole power system, such as PV microgrids. PV microgrids include electrical renewable generation and electrical energy usage which have increased enormously in recent years. Their effective performance is crucial from several perspectives, including renewable energy production, distributed generation, energy management, energy storage, and condition monitoring for predictive maintenance for generation technologies, among others. From the point of view of electric generation, many issues need to be attended to: systems condition monitoring oriented to predictive maintenance and transient phenomena in electric power networks. Another important aspect related to the uncertainty of generation with renewable energies is their management, their integration, and the necessity of energy storage. For these reasons, scientific interest in some of the topics mentioned above is crucial to develop more sustainable energy generation schemes and proper energy usage according to the current context.  The purpose of this Special Issue is to present contributions to problems of scientific interest related to the use and generation of electrical energy in the ongoing context of the integration of sustainable energy sources. The scope of this Special Issue is broad, though it is focused on electrical engineering and PV microgrids. The scope includes PV energy production, microgrids or distributed energy, and energy management, energy storage and condition monitoring of electrical equipment for predictive maintenance purposes. Furthermore, transient phenomena studies in electric networks where PV generation and electrical loads are integrated are welcome as well, since this helps to develop a better sustainable power system.

Dr. Ignacio Martin-Diaz
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • distributed energy
  • renewable energy production
  • PV microgrids
  • sustainable energy management
  • energy storage
  • predictive maintenance
  • condition monitoring
  • transient phenomena in electric networks

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

32 pages, 8258 KiB  
Article
Optimal Incremental Conductance-Based MPPT Control Methodology for a 100 KW Grid-Connected PV System Employing the RUNge Kutta Optimizer
by Kareem M. AboRas, Abdullah Hameed Alhazmi and Ashraf Ibrahim Megahed
Sustainability 2025, 17(13), 5841; https://doi.org/10.3390/su17135841 - 25 Jun 2025
Viewed by 432
Abstract
Solar energy is a promising and sustainable green energy source, showing significant advancements in photovoltaic (PV) system deployment. To maximize PV efficiency, robust maximum power point tracking (MPPT) methods are essential, as the maximum power point (MPP) shifts with changing irradiance and temperature. [...] Read more.
Solar energy is a promising and sustainable green energy source, showing significant advancements in photovoltaic (PV) system deployment. To maximize PV efficiency, robust maximum power point tracking (MPPT) methods are essential, as the maximum power point (MPP) shifts with changing irradiance and temperature. This paper proposes a novel MPPT control strategy for a 100 kW grid-connected PV system, based on the incremental conductance (IC) method and enhanced by a cascaded Fractional Order Proportional–Integral (FOPI) and conventional Proportional–Integral (PI) controller. The controller parameters are optimally tuned using the recently introduced RUNge Kutta optimizer (RUN). MATLAB/Simulink simulations have been conducted on the 100 kW benchmark PV model integrated into a medium-voltage grid, with the objective of minimizing the integral square error (ISE) to improve efficiency. The performance of the proposed IC-MPPT-(FOPI-PI) controller has been benchmarked against standalone PI and FOPI controllers, and the RUN optimizer is here compared with recent metaheuristic algorithms, including the Gorilla Troops Optimizer (GTO) and the African Vultures Optimizer (AVO). The evaluation covers five different environmental scenarios, including step, ramp, and realistic irradiance and temperature profiles. The RUN-optimized controller achieved exceptional performance with 99.984% tracking efficiency, sub-millisecond rise time (0.0012 s), rapid settling (0.015 s), and minimal error (ISE: 16.781), demonstrating outstanding accuracy, speed, and robustness. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Electrical Engineering and PV Microgrids)
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