Guest editorial: special section on applications of power electronics in power systems

ower transformers and steam turbines were the key drivers in the development of the AC power system paradigm at the dawn of the 20th century, characterized by huge synchronous generators feeding millions of passive loads through large interconnected systems, all of them supervised and controlled from a centralized energy management system (EMS). In the same way, thyristor valves and IGBTs, introduced in the seventies and nineties of the past century, respectively, are called to play a similar role in the decarbonized power systems of the 21st century, where distributed generators will compete to a large extent with centralized ones to deliver mostly renewable energy to smarter loads through more flexible and hybrid (i.e., AC-DC) networks, operated in a hierarchical and partly distributed fashion with the help of ubiquitous digital technologies. Power electronics first appeared in transmission power systems in the form of high voltage DC (HVDC) lines, and soon after as static var compensators (SVC), whose terrific success and