In recent decades, wind energy generation has established itself as one of the most promising sources of renewable electricity worldwide. Driven by the growing demand for sustainable energy sources and the need to mitigate the environmental impacts of fossil fuels, wind power has taken on a strategic role in the energy matrices of several countries. With continuous technological advancements, wind turbines have become increasingly efficient, reliable, and economically viable, contributing to the rapid expansion of wind farms on a global scale. The performance of these turbines is directly linked to the aerodynamic design of their components, especially the blades, which are responsible for capturing the wind’s kinetic energy and converting it into mechanical energy. In this context, improving blade design becomes essential to maximize energy production, reduce losses, and increase equipment lifespan. Given this scenario, the article presents a study on the optimization of wind turbine blades, focusing on enhancing their efficiency. The main design parameters will be discussed, and the effect of geometric modifications on the overall turbine performance will be analyzed.

Energy management systems for microgrids are tailored to meet specific application needs and consider technical, economic, environmental, and reliability requirements. Regardless of their centralized or distributed structure, these systems are designed to efficiently manage microgrid operations, including energy generation, storage, and consumption, to ensure a reliable energy supply. In addition to these functions, the Energy Management System is also responsible for dealing with protection devices and systematically reacting to them to minimize disruptions, guaranteeing operational security. This study presents the strategies of a centralized energy management system deployed in a critical microgrid in Maranhão, Brazil. The protection functions in the protection devices for the two operating modes (on-grid and off-grid) and the subsequent decisions implemented as rules in the Energy Management System are discussed. This coordination between protection devices and management systems ensures rapid and selective response to faults, enhancing microgrid security and facilitating problem detection and resolution.

The microgrids have been applied satisfactorily for the supply of energy to isolated places. In isolated microgrids, energy storage systems and dispatchable energy sources are fundamental for continuous operation, and for power balance. The dispatchable sources are useful as backup, for maintenance operations, and for battery bank equalization charges. Practical experiences in isolated microgrids that uses synchronous generator (driven by a prime mover) have a potential operation problem when working with rectifiers to charge the battery bank whenever the available renewable resources are not sufficient. This is due the generator reactance that causes voltage distortions at the generator terminals, power quality problems for the microgrid and, eventually, inhibition of rectifier operation whenever there is a thyristor switching. This paper proposes the design of a bidirectional DC-AC converter control loops for application in isolated microgrids, improving the power quality, efficiency and operation. In addition, the use of a bidirectional converter reduces energy conversion losses and reduces the costs of implementing the microgrid by replacing two pieces of equipment (AC-DC and DC-AC converters) for just a single one. The contributions of the paper are the design methodology of the control loops of a bidirectional converter, whose development and application in real environment allows it to perform as grid-forming converter in isolated microgrids.

In this article, results and indicators of the operation evolution of the solar-wind hybrid microgrid installed on the island of Lençóis, Maranhão, Brazil, after ten years of operation are reported. This microgrid is considered a national reference project due to the longevity and robustness in serving the marine islands. This analysis evaluates aspects such as load evolution, challenges identified and overcome, experience with the storage system, and improvements introduced. Indicators of efficiency and socio-economic impacts are also presented and discussed.

The great number of lawsuits against energy companies has highlighted the difficult problem of identifying and eliminating failures of services in the energy sector. This work proposes a methodology to predict the issue of new lawsuits in the energy sector on a client database and the identification of factors correlated factors. The methodology is basically divided into 4 stages: (a) data acquisition; (b) feature engineering; (c) feature selection; and (d) classification. The method was performed in a database with more than fifty thousand consumers and shows to be robust in the task of identify the unregistered power consumption lawsuits prediction by achieved an accuracy of 93.89; specificity of 95.58; sensitivity of 88.84; and precision of 87.09. Thus, we demonstrate the feasibility of using XGBoost to solve the problem of unregistered power consumption lawsuits prediction.