The special issue of articles on renewable energy challenges [Guest editorial]

Many seminars, workshops, and conferences organized across IEEE over the last decade have shown increasing interest in electricity generation, in particular in renewable energy, by experts and non-experts alike. The major reasons for this interest have been: deregulation of the electric power industry introduced in a number of jurisdictions worldwide, increasing energy bills for business and residential consumers, large power outages (such as the August 2003 blackout in North America), cost and volatility of fossil fuel supplies, environmental pollution, increasing gap between energy demand and supply, larger presence and perceived potential of distributed energy resources (DER), and concern for a sustainable energy future.