Power optimizers are devices that recover part of the energy lost. Currently, the research are focused on wind and solar, being basically converters with some intelligence implemented.
They are still not financially viable, in most cases. I believe that with research and development of power electronics, will be options in the future.
In photovoltaic energy, highlights in the market the products of SolarEdge e Tigo.
Main equipment for optimisation of the operation of renewable energy systems is optimal controller. Fixing up the type and also the logic for switching and adoption modern optimisation techniques for fixing parameters are all what will be required.
Well, for energy you may use power electronics in a form of inverter to produce AC from DC, in wind energy you may use power electronics in many forms such as the DFEG and so on to assure synchronization and power stability
Well if you are talking about "renewables" like Solar wind and geothermal, Then the cyclical nature of their intermittent power production creates dangerous excesses and gaps in the power on the grid. In some parts of the USA the grid is over 100 years old and cannot handle big swings of energy during high use periods. There are power controllers that monitor the grid usage in large cities, and they have to keep the generators equal to the draw or usage. I'll give you a hypothetical: So Imagine there is a big draw increasing load on the grid so they order some power from a nearby solar farm. They are going to need 100MW. So they put that power on the grid right when the draw increase is close to 100MW. Then a big cloud comes in and less than 3 min, the solar farm is only producing 5 MW. There is a draw of 95MW that is imbalanced and this condition can blow equipment or cause shutdowns. They will now be forced to order from another plant 95MW to fill the hole and be balanced. They order the power immediately, and apply the new power. Now the cloud passes. Now there is a surplus of 95MW on the grid and risk blowing equipment. Now they order the peaking plant to turn off the newly ordered 95MW to replace what the solar could not produce. They just risked blowing a city's 400 billion dollar grid for a few MW of solar twice in ten minutes.
Do you see now? Solar is not stable or usable on the grid at all. Ever. The more solar, wind, Geo-thermal power you have on the grid the more likely it will crash or break the grid. You cannot have ANY imbalance in power on the grid. The power used has to equal the power made at all times 24/7 365. When it doesn't equipment fails or shuts down. Then you have to service and maintenance this failed equipment. There is a huge downtime for some of these items because they are short supply and custom hand made items. It takes almost a year to order a transformer. Can you imagine having to order a million dollar transformer that takes a year to be delivered and installed just because the solar farm blew it up because of a cloud in ten minutes?
This is why you will never see renewables as a big mainstream source. Their ONLY use safely is Industry, or end user augmentation, because this power source does not belong on the grid at all...
Now if you are talking about actual renewables, there are only a few. Bio-Fuel, Thorium, there are a few chemical sources, and some others I won't bother to mention. These are not going to be used because of politics and economics and logistics.
But to answer your original question, Super-Battery/Super-Capacitor farms. The battery technology has to increase quite a bit for renewables to be viable. If you have a large farm of those we could make Renewables a small part of the grid. Personally, I designed a Solar Wind Battery Capacitor generator to do just that. Its the best chance for them. But the power industry will not adopt or validate it no matter how well it works. Its only chance to survive is as a separate stand alone business unit for a private company.
Providing longer lifetime, and low self power consumption PE technologies with reasonable costs are considered among the valuable solutions for long-term optimization of practical electronically interfaced RE systems.
Power electronic devices operate as switches in the power conditioning circuits for the renewable energy sources. These circuits are rectifiers, controlled rectifiers, DC/DC convertes acting as voltage transformation and DC/AC inverters
working as a stand alone or grid connected.
As they work as switches , it is required that they behave as ideal switches, which means zero on resistance , infinite off resistance and zero switching on and off times. The power devices have gone tremendous advancements to enhance their on and off characteristics in addition to speed up their switching speed to operate at high frequencies to reduce the size of the smoothing filters.
There is now the power MOSFETS and the IGBT , which are the metal oxide fleld effect transistors and the insulated gate bipolar transistor with the IGBT having lower switching losses.
So these solid sate switches are characterized also by lower power drivers which make their driving an easy task compared to other power devices thank to their MOS gate.