Guest Editorial Special Section on Energy-Efficient Technologies

EET Editorial Committee

Guest Editorial Special Section on Energy-Efficient Technologies

EET Editorial Committee

As global energy demands continue increasing, the constant improvement of energy efficiency has been a consensus in the world wide and received more and more attention from not only the technical but also the sociological, economic, and political sectors. Energy efficient technologies have been not only transforming the way that energy is produced, delivered, and consumed, but also changing every aspect of our life and even the future.1

To encourage researchers to become even more interested and participate in this hopeful and significant area and bring together the state-of-the-art research results and industrial applications of energy-efficient technologies, we launched the Special Section on Energy-Efficient Technologies (EET) on JEST. So far, we have published three EET special sections which are focused onEnergy-Efficient Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems,Energy Management for Different Power Systems, andEmerging Energy-Efficient Devices and Integration Paradigms, respectively.

In this section, by a very careful review of many highly qualified submissions, we accepted 3 papers which cover the areas of the novel energy concept for energy turnaround and control technologies for renewable energy systems.

This section begins with a review:The Crowd Energy Conceptwritten by Prof. S. Teufel, University of Fribourg, Switzerland and Prof. B. Teufel, Dr. Teufel Consultancy Services, Switzerland, which presents the crowd energy concept for energy generation, storage, and consumption and the necessary research fields are identified. In this review, the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011 is mentioned. After the disaster, European politicians began to reassess the energy strategy for their countries. Currently, with the new developments of energy turnaround, the way back from the centralized architecture of our energy system to a more decentralized one is predetermined. Decentralization implies the change in the role of today’s consumers. They become energy prosumers. This is the basis for the crowd energy concept. This paper points that only with the helps from different dimensions, the crowd energy concept can be a successful and sustainable implementation.

With the increasing applications of renewable energy sources, conventional controllers may no longer be able to damp the frequency deviation brought by the renewable energy sources output and load fluctuations. The second paper,Coefficient Diagram Method Based Load Frequency Control for a Modern Power System, proposes a frequency control method for the power system with controllable or dispatchable loads. This paper shows the ability of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, heat pumps, and batteries to contribute in the frequency control of an isolated power system. And this paper proposes a new online intelligent approach by using a coefficient diagram method (CDM) to enhance the system performance and robustness against uncertainties. The performance of the proposed intelligent CDM control has been compared with the proportional-integral controller and the superiority of the proposed scheme has been verified in Matlab/Simulink programs.

The third paper,Solar Energy System with Digital Controller for Grid Connected Systems, presents the implementation of an automatic digital controller of a DC-DC boost converter without batteries for a solar cell module by using a PIC microcontroller. The proposed scheme can track the maximum power operating point to adjust the photovoltaic operating voltage close to the maximum under changing atmospheric conditions. The proposed controller is verified by the simulated results by using Proteus 8 and hardware implemented results.

As the editorial committee of EET, we would like to express our sincere gratitude to all authors and reviewers for their great contribution to this Special Section. We also would like to thank the editorial staffs for their efforts throughout the process.

We hope the EET special section continues at a high standard and involves increasing researchers in this promising and important research area for our future green consummation life.

EET Editorial CommitteeSeptember, 2014

Digital Object Identifier: 10.3969/j.issn.1674-862X.2014.03.004