Long-Term Trends and Disruption in Medium Voltage Power Electronics: Identifying Future Power Electronics Technologies of High Impact

Abstract

Medium voltage converters are a key component of renewable energy systems like photovoltaic and wind, of large scale energy storage systems like batteries or hydrogen, and of applications like electric vehicle charging, datacenters, large medium voltage drives, hydrogen production and “green steel”. All these high-power applications went into exponential growth in the last decade and will keep growing during the next decades driven by the so-called “electrification”, the trend to replace fossil fuels by electricity based on renewable energy. The drivers of these trends and the role of power electronics are discussed, especially also the Solid-State Transformer (SST).