Advances in Sustainable Electrical Engineering

Dear Colleagues,

Over the last few decades, the depletion of fossil fuels and global climate change have motivated researchers and industrial actors to find other alternatives to produce electricity efficiently and cleanly. To cope with the depletion of fossil fuel resources and global warming, the use of renewable energy resources such as wind turbines, photovoltaic, biomass, hydroelectricity, and geothermal energy seems to be the most efficient alternative to fossil fuels in the future by providing electricity cleanly and efficiently. In addition, hydrogen is considered one of the most promising alternative fuels for a sustainable future, because it is the simplest element on earth (consisting of only one proton and one electron) and has the capability to store and deliver usable energy. The cleanest way to produce hydrogen is to combine the water electrolysis process and renewable energy sources. This combination will allow for disseminating future decarbonized energy systems at a large scale. Once hydrogen is produced via water electrolysis, it can be used in fuel cells to generate electricity, producing only water and heat as byproducts. Fuel cells can be used in a wide range of applications, such as transportation (i.e., fuel cell electric vehicles), material handling, portable emergency backup power, and microgrids (combined with renewable energy sources and energy storage devices). Compared to classical energy storage devices such as batteries, hydrogen provides a higher energy density (around 120 MJ/kg), enabling storing a large amount of energy that can be useful to ease intermittent power discontinuances by storing excess energy from renewable energy sources at periods of low energy requirements and delivering stored energy at periods of high energy requirements.

In hybrid electrical systems combining renewable energy sources, hydrogen technologies, and energy storage devices, the use of power electronics is needed to control the whole system, ensuring its stability and performance according to the energy demand. As a result, to meet these purposes in terms of stability and performance, new control techniques must be developed for power electronics applications.

Only by enhancing control techniques will hybrid electrical systems be introduced as a reliable and sustainable distributed power generation system.

This Special Issue aims at attracting original high-quality papers and review articles focused on control techniques for power electronics applications applied to hybrid energy systems coupling renewable energy sources, hydrogen technologies, and energy storage devices.

Prospective authors may submit contributions dealing with (but not limited to):

-        Development of new control techniques for power electronics applications.

-        Energy management of hybrid electrical systems.

-        Development of new power electronics topologies.

-        Fault-tolerant topologies and control.

-        Reliability of power electronics.

-        Integration of hydrogen technologies in hybrid electrical systems.

Prof. Dr. Phatiphat Thounthong
Dr. Damien Guilbert
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.