In photovoltaic (PV) applications, a transformer is often used to provide galvanic isolation and voltage ratio transformations between input and output. However, these conventional iron and copper-based transformers increase the weight/size and cost of the inverter whilst reducing the efficiency and power density. It is therefore desirable to avoid using transformers in the inverter. However, additional care must be taken to avoid safety hazards such as ground fault currents and leakage currents, e.g. via the parasitic capacitor between the PV panel and ground. Consequently, the grid connected transformerless PV inverters must comply with strict safety standards such as IEEE 1547.1, VDE0126-1-1, EN 50106, IEC61727, and AS/NZS 5033. Various transformerless inverters have been proposed recently to eliminate the leakage current using different techniques such as decoupling the DC from the AC side and/or clamping the common mode (CM) voltage during the freewheeling period, or using common ground configurations. The permutations and combinations of various decoupling techniques with integrated voltage buck-boost for maximum power point tracking (MPPT) allow numerous new topologies and configurations which are often confusing and difficult to follow when seeking to select the right topology. Therefore, to present a clear picture on the development of transformerless inverters for the next generation grid-connected PV systems, this paper aims to comprehensively review and classify various transformerless inverters with detailed analytical comparisons. To reinforce the findings and comparisons as well as to give more insight on the CM characteristics and leakage current, computer simulations of major transformerless inverter topologies have been performed in PLECS software. Moreover, the cost and size are analysed properly and summarized in a table. Finally, efficiency and thermal analysis are provided with a general summary as well as a technology roadmap.

Second-order generalized integrator (SOGI) based phase-locked loops (PLLs) are widely used for grid synchronization in single-phase grid-connected power converters. Previously, the estimated frequency of the PLL stage is fed back to the frontend SOGI block to make SOGI-PLLs frequency-adaptive, which increases the implementation complexity, and makes the tuning sensitive, thus reducing stability margins. Alternatively, a frequencyfixed SOGI based PLL (briefly called FFSOGI-PLL) is proposed to ensure stability and simple implementation in this letter. It is commonly known that the in-phase and quadrature-phase signals generated by the frequency-fixed SOGI are of different amplitudes in the presence of frequency drifts, which causes second harmonic ripples in the estimated parameters of the PLL loop. To deal with this issue, a simple yet effective method is developed in FFSOGIPLL. The standard SOGI-PLL is firstly introduced, followed by the working principle and small-signal model of FFSOGI-PLL. The FFSOGI-PLL is then compared with the SOGI-PLL in terms of stability and transient performance. Finally, experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of FFSOGI-PLL.

Penetration of renewable energy sources (RESs) and electrical energy storage (EES) systems in distribution systems is increasing, and it is crucial to investigate their impact on systems' operation scheme, reliability, and security. In this paper, expected energy not supplied (EENS) and voltage stability index (VSI) of distribution networks are investigated in dynamic balanced and unbalanced distribution network reconfiguration, including RESs and EES systems. Furthermore, due to the high investment cost of the EES systems, the number of charge and discharge is limited, and the state-of-health constraint is included in the underlying problem to prolong the lifetime of these facilities. The optimal charging/discharging scheme for EES systems and optimal distribution network topology are presented in order to optimize the operational costs, and reliability and security indices simultaneously. The proposed strategy is applied to a large-scale 119-bus distribution test network in order to show the economic justification of the proposed approach.