Advances in Smart Grids and Microgrids: Distributed Generation and Energy Storage Systems

The global energy transition toward decarbonization and digitalization is profoundly reshaping modern power systems. Smart grids and microgrids have become core enabling technologies for accommodating high-penetration renewable energy, facilitating flexible source–load interaction, and enhancing system efficiency, reliability, and resilience. Based on the Special Issue “Advances in Smart Grids and Microgrids: Distributed Generation and Energy Storage Systems” and recent state-of-the-art progress, this paper systematically reviews key research advances in four core areas: planning and design paradigms, operation optimization and control under uncertainty, economic and market mechanism design, and resilience and cyber–physical security. Emphasis is placed on the synergistic optimization between distributed renewable generation and advanced energy storage (ES) systems in both single-energy and multi-energy architectures. Typical applications in urban areas, remote islands, and hardware-in-the-loop validation are summarized. Furthermore, major challenges and future trends are highlighted, including cross-scale interoperability, resilient control, cyber–physical security, advanced ES, electricity–carbon integrated markets, and so on. It is demonstrated that the transition from deterministic centralized frameworks to stochastic distributed multi-energy integrated systems has become an inevitable trend, and interdisciplinary collaboration will further promote the development of clean, resilient, cost-effective, and equitable smart grids and microgrids.