Superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES) technology has been progressed actively recently. To represent the state-of-the-art SMES research for applications, this work presents the system modeling, performance evaluation, and application prospects of emerging SMES techniques in modern power system and future smart grid integrated with photovoltaic power plants. A novel circuit-fieldsuperconductor coupled SMES energy exchange model is built and verified to bridge the applied superconductivity field to the electrical engineering and power system fields. As an emerging SMES application case to suit photovoltaic power plants, a novel low-voltage rated DC power system integrated with superconducting cable and SMES techniques is introduced and verified to implement both the highperformance fault current limitation and transient power buffering functions. Four principal SMES application schemes of a sole SMES system, a hybrid energy storage system (HESS) consisting of small-scale SMES and other commercial energy storage systems, a distributed SMES (DSMES) system, and a distributed HESS (DHESS) are proposed and compared for achieving efficient and economical power management applications in future photovoltaic power plants.