Power electronics intensive solutions for integrated urban building renewable energy systems

In recent years, renewable energy resources have attracted a lot of effort and attention, due to issues related to utilization of traditional fossil fuels. Global warming, major energy crises, and unsecure energy supply has motivated developed countries to speed-up the process of installing renewable technologies. On the other hand, deregulation of power systems, with the aim of more competitive and efficient power generation, creates new opportunities for use of renewable technologies at the distribution level. Residential and commercial buildings consume a great portion of generated power in most countries. Therefore, there exists a need for reduction of power consumption, by using efficient generation technologies, using local renewable energy generation. This paper comprehensively reviews potential and available renewable energy technologies, to be embedded in new or existing urban buildings, and investigates a few novel building power system arrangements.