An increase in human activities and population growth have significantly increased the world’s energy demands. The major source of energy for the world today is from fossil fuels, which are polluting and degrading the environment due to the emission of greenhouse gases. Hydrogen is an identified efficient energy carrier and can be obtained through renewable and non-renewable sources. An overview of renewable sources of hydrogen production which focuses on water splitting (electrolysis, thermolysis, and photolysis) and biomass (biological and thermochemical) mechanisms is presented in this study. The limitations associated with these mechanisms are discussed. The study also looks at some critical factors that hinders the scaling up of the hydrogen economy globally. Key among these factors are issues relating to the absence of a value chain for clean hydrogen, storage and transportation of hydrogen, high cost of production, lack of international standards, and risks in investment. The study ends with some future research recommendations for researchers to help enhance the technical efficiencies of some production mechanisms, and policy direction to governments to reduce investment risks in the sector to scale the hydrogen economy up.

Sub‐synchronous interaction (SSI) phenomenon is one of the dynamic system problems that have an adverse influence on the safety and stability of the system.The use of supplementary damping controllers (SDCs) in the double‐fed induction generator (DFIG) converter controllers is quite promising due to their simplicity,low costs, effectiveness, and easiness of tuning. This paper presents a new effective input control signal, rotor voltage, to the SDC for damping SSI in a series‐compensated DFIG‐based wind farm. The proposed SDC is embedded into both the q‐axis and d‐axis of the rotor‐side converter inner current loops. Particle swarm optimization algorithm is used to identify the optimum parameters of the SDC which maintain the system stability at various operation conditions. Both eigenvalue analysis and time‐domain simulations have been carried out to demonstrate the capability of the proposed SDC for enhancing the system stability and damping SSI. Compared to the conventional SDC, the proposed SDC has the best performance where it can quickly and robustly damp the SSI at different compensation levels, different wind speeds, and sub‐synchronous control interaction.

The optimal reactive power dispatch (ORPD) problem is an important issue to assign the most efficient and secure operating point of the electrical system. The ORPD became a strenuous task, especially with the high penetration of renewable energy resources due to the intermittent and stochastic nature of wind speed and solar irradiance. In this paper, the ORPD is solved using a new natural inspired algorithm called the marine predators’ algorithm (MPA) considering the uncertainties of the load demand and the output powers of wind and solar generation systems. The scenario-based method is applied to handle the uncertainties of the system by generating deterministic scenarios from the probability density functions of the system parameters. The proposed algorithm is applied to solve the ORPD of the IEEE-30 bus system to minimize the power loss and the system voltage devotions. The result verifies that the proposed method is an efficient method for solving the ORPD compared with the state-of-the-art techniques.

Clean energy resources have become a worldwide concern, especially photovoltaic (PV) energy. Solar cell modeling is considered one of the most important issues in this field. In this article, an improvement for the search steps of the bald eagle search algorithm is proposed. The improved bald eagle search (IBES) was applied to estimate more accurate PV model parameters. The IBES algorithm was applied for conventional single, double, and triple PV models, in addition to modified single, double, and triple PV models. The IBES was evaluated by comparing its results with the original BES through 15 benchmark functions. For a more comprehensive analysis, two evaluation tasks were performed. In the first task, the IBES results were compared with the original BES for parameter estimation of original and modified tribe diode models. In the second task, the IBES results were compared with different recent algorithms for parameter estimation of original and modified single and double diode models. All tasks were performed using the real data for a commercial silicon solar cell (R.T.C. France). From the results, it can be concluded that the results of the modified models were more accurate than the conventional PV models, and the IBES behavior was better than the original BES and other compared algorithms.

In recent years, multilevel inverters (MLIs) have emerged to be the most empowered power transformation technology for numerous operations such as renewable energy resources (RERs), flexible AC transmission systems (FACTS), electric motor drives, etc. MLI has gained popularity in medium- to high-power operations because of numerous merits such as minimum harmonic contents, less dissipation of power from power electronic switches, and less electromagnetic interference (EMI) at the receiving end. The MLI possesses many essential advantages in comparison to a conventional two-level inverter, such as voltage profile enhancement, increased efficiency of the overall system, the capability of high-quality output generation with the reduced switching frequency, decreased total harmonic distortions (THD) without reducing the power of the inverter and use of very low ratings of the device. Although classical MLIs find their use in various vital key areas, newer MLI configurations have an expanding concern to the limited count of power electronic devices, gate drivers, and isolated DC sources. In this review article, an attempt has been made to focus on various aspects of MLIs such as different configurations, modulation techniques, the concept of new reduced switch count MLI topologies, applications regarding interface with renewable energy, motor drives, and FACTS controller. Further, deep insights for future prospective towards hassle-free addition of MLI technology towards more enhanced application for various fields of the power system have also been discussed. This article is believed to be extremely helpful for academics, researchers, and industrialists working in the direction of MLI technology.

Optimal inclusion of a photovoltaic system and wind energy resources in electrical grids is a strenuous task due to the continuous variation of their output powers and stochastic nature. Thus, it is mandatory to consider the variations of the Renewable energy resources (RERs) for efficient energy management in the electric system. The aim of the paper is to solve the energy management of a micro-grid (MG) connected to the main power system considering the variations of load demand, photovoltaic (PV), and wind turbine (WT) under deterministic and probabilistic conditions. The energy management problem is solved using an efficient algorithm, namely equilibrium optimizer (EO), for a multi-objective function which includes cost minimization, voltage profile improvement, and voltage stability improvement. The simulation results reveal that the optimal installation of a grid-connected PV unit and WT can considerably reduce the total cost and enhance system performance. In addition to that, EO is superior to both whale optimization algorithm (WOA) and sine cosine algorithm (SCA) in terms of the reported objective function.

This work presents a comprehensive analysis of two cubic techniques for Power Flow (PF) studies. In this regard, the families of Weerakoon-like and Darvishi-like techniques are considered. Several theoretical findings are presented and posteriorly confirmed by multiple numerical results. Based on the obtained results, the Weerakoon’s technique is considered more reliable than the Newton-Raphson and Darvishi’s methods. As counterpart, it presents a high computational burden. Regarding this point, the Darvishi’s technique has turned out to be quite efficient and fully competitive with the Newton’s scheme.

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