Recently, electric vehicle (EV) technology has received massive attention worldwide due to its improved performance efficiency and significant contributions to addressing carbon emission problems. In line with that, EVs could play a vital role in achieving sustainable development goals (SDGs). However, EVs face some challenges such as battery health degradation, battery management complexities, power electronics integration, and appropriate charging strategies. Therefore, further investigation is essential to select appropriate battery storage and management system, technologies, algorithms, controllers, and optimization schemes. Although numerous studies have been carried out on EV technology, the state-of-the-art technology, progress, limitations, and their impacts on achieving SDGs have not yet been examined. Hence, this review paper comprehensively and critically describes the various technological advancements of EVs, focusing on key aspects such as storage technology, battery management system, power electronics technology, charging strategies, methods, algorithms, and optimizations. Moreover, numerous open issues, challenges, and concerns are discussed to identify the existing research gaps. Furthermore, this paper develops the relationship between EVs benefits and SDGs concerning social, economic, and environmental impacts. The analysis reveals that EVs have a substantial influence on various goals of sustainable development, such as affordable and clean energy, sustainable cities and communities, industry, economic growth, and climate actions. Lastly, this review delivers fruitful and effective suggestions for future enhancement of EV technology that would be beneficial to the EV engineers and industrialists to develop efficient battery storage, charging approaches, converters, controllers, and optimizations toward targeting SDGs.

This paper describes the design, construction, and testing of a 750-V 100-kW 20-kHz bidirectional isolated dual-active-bridge dc-dc converter using four 1.2-kV 400-A SiC-MOSFET/SBD dual modules. The maximum conversion efficiency from the dc-input to the dc-output terminals is accurately measured to be as high as 98.7% at 42-kW operation. The overall power loss at the rated-power (100 kW) operation, excluding the gate-drive and control circuit losses, is divided into the conduction and switching losses produced by the SiC modules, the iron and copper losses due to magnetic devices, and the other unknown loss. The power-loss breakdown concludes that the sum of the conduction and switching losses is about 60% of the overall power loss and that the conduction loss is nearly equal to the switching loss at the 100-kW and 20-kHz operation.

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is envisioned as potential solution to overcome maximum power point tracking (MPPT) problems. Nevertheless, conventional PSO suffers from large transient oscillation, slow convergence and tedious parameter tuning when tracking global MPP (GMPP) under partial shading conditions (PSC), leading to poor efficiency and significant power loss. Therefore, a modified PSO hybridized with adaptive local search (MPSO-HALS) is designed as a robust, real-time MPPT algorithm. A modified initialization scheme that leverages grid partitioning and oppositional-based learning is incorporated to produce an evenly distributed initial population across P-V curve. Additionally, a rank-based selection scheme is adopted to choose best half of population for subsequent global and local search modes. A modified global search method with fewer parameters is devised to rapidly identify approximated location of GMPP. Finally, a modified local search method using Perturb and Observe with adaptive step size method (P&O-ASM) is proposed to refine the near-optimal duty cycle and track GMPP with negligible oscillations. MPSO-HALS is implemented into low-cost microcontroller for real-time application. Extensive studies prove the proposed algorithm outperforms bat algorithm (BA), improved grey wolf optimizer (IGWO), conventional PSO and P&O, with convergence time shorter than 0.3 s and tracking accuracy above 99% under different complex PSCs.

In the past few years, the application and research community has expressed a lot of interest in managing energy and power while using distributed generation systems. Electricity generation and its usage coordination are vital aspects of energy efficiency that can help in saving energy, decreasing energy costs, and fulfilling global emission objectives. Owing to the relevance of the topic, here, the researchers have presented a comparative and critical review of recent developments in the fields of energy management systems (EMSs) and power management systems (PMSs). Furthermore, the researchers also reviewed the various EMS and PMS methods that could be used for reviewing microgrid (MG) and nanogrid (NG) systems. The EMS for MG and NG systems helps in addressing important economic objectives like minimisation of operational costs after optimising the fuel costs, emission costs, and battery degradation costs, while also improving the life of the MG devices. Alternatively, the PMS helps in addressing technical objectives like improving the stability, flexibility, reliability, and quality of MG and NG systems. The researchers have also discussed the drawbacks and challenges affecting the widespread application of EMSs and PMSs.

Hourly global solar irradiance (GSR) data are required for sizing, planning, and modeling of solar photovoltaic farms. However, operating and controlling such farms exposed to varying environmental conditions, such as fast passing clouds, necessitates GSR data to be available for very short time intervals. Classical backpropagation neural networks do not perform satisfactorily when predicting parameters within short intervals. This paper proposes a hybrid backpropagation neural networks based on particle swarm optimization. The particle swarm algorithm is used as an optimization algorithm within the backpropagation neural networks to optimize the number of hidden layers and neurons used and its learning rate. The proposed model can be used as a reliable model in predicting changes in the solar irradiance during short time interval in tropical regions such as Malaysia and other regions. Actual global solar irradiance data of 5-s and 1-min intervals, recorded by weather stations, are applied to train and test the proposed algorithm. Moreover, to ensure the adaptability and robustness of the proposed technique, two different cases are evaluated using 1-day and 3-days profiles, for two different time intervals of 1-min and 5-s each. A set of statistical error indices have been introduced to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. From the results obtained, the 3-days profile’s performance evaluation of the BPNN-PSO are 1.7078 of RMSE, 0.7537 of MAE, 0.0292 of MSE, and 31.4348 of MAPE (%), at 5-s time interval, where the obtained results of 1-min interval are 0.6566 of RMSE, 0.2754 of MAE, 0.0043 of MSE, and 1.4732 of MAPE (%). The results revealed that proposed model outperformed the standalone backpropagation neural networks method in predicting global solar irradiance values for extremely short-time intervals. In addition to that, the proposed model exhibited high level of predictability compared to other existing models.

Hybrid systems have gained significant attention among researchers and scientists worldwide due to their ability to integrate solar cells and supercapacitors. Subsequently, this has led to rising demands for green energy, miniaturization and mini-electronic wearable devices. These hybrid devices will lead to sustainable energy becoming viable and fossil-fuel-based sources of energy gradually being replaced. A solar photovoltaic (SPV) system is an electronic device that mainly functions to convert photon energy to electrical energy using a solar power source. It has been widely used in developed countries given that they have advanced photovoltaic (PV) technology that reduces dependence on fossil fuels for energy generation. Furthermore, a supercapacitor is an alternative solution for replacing heavy batteries and it is a system with a prominent high power density and a long life cycle. Its unique properties of high capacitance with low voltage limits lead to this highly in-demand material being incorporated into goods and services that are produced by the electrical and electronics industries. It is another option for grid-based power or large batteries. Since supercapacitors have the ability to store huge amounts of energy, they allow for a novel system that integrates supercapacitors with solar cells in which energy generation and energy storage are combined into one system. This paper explores the common materials that are used for solar cells and supercapacitors, the working mechanisms, the effectiveness of the integrated device and the technical challenges that are encountered when refining this device. Hence, this review serves as a guide for choosing the right materials and methods in order to produce an integrated PV solar cell–energy storage device for various applications.