Guest Editorial Special Issue on Emerging Applications of Power Electronics in Developing Economies

Three billion people around the world live in severe energy poverty, including 1.1 billion who live completely off-grid. Providing affordable energy access to them can dramatically impact their living standard, health, education, productivity, and ability to be a part of modern society. In developing economies, the utilization of energy is also limited to some extent. Many programs and initiatives (e.g., the IEEE Empower a Billion Lives and the IEEE Smart Village) have been doing stellar work in tackling energy poverty in developing economies. However, much remains to be done to crowdsource relevant innovation to accelerate the deployment of energy access solutions in the affected areas, including the developing economies. According to the previous programs and initiatives, it has been identified that power electronics is one of the key technologies to address real-life issues in energy access and utilization, water supply, rural transportation, etc., for developing economies. In this context, it calls for innovative and scalable solutions that should be for emerging applications of power electronics with an emphasis on technical innovation and business viability to rapidly and sustainably scale to a wide range of customers in developing economies. Hence, we organized this Special Issue on <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Emerging Applications of Power Electronics in Developing Economies</i> , aiming to bring together researchers, experts, policy makers, and stakeholders to tackle energy poverty issues in developing economies.