Power electronics and reliability in renewable energy systems

Power Electronics are needed in almost all kind of renewable energy systems. It is used both for controlling the renewable source and also for interfacing to the load, which can be grid-connected or working in stand-alone mode. More and more efforts are put into making renewable energy systems better in terms of reliability in order to ensure a high availability of the power sources, in this case the knowledge of mission profile of a certain application is crucial for the reliability evaluation/design of power electronics. In this paper an overview on the power electronic circuits behind the most common converter configurations for wind turbine and photovoltaic is done. Next different aspects of improving the system reliability are mapped. Further on examples of how to control the chip temperature in different power electronic configurations as well as operation modes for wind power generation systems are given in order to reduce the temperature cycling.