ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      I consider myself extremely fortunate to have learned and to be inspired by some of the extraordinarily distinguished and selfless teachers, researchers, and individuals, to whom I shall forever be grateful beyond words. Their immense wisdom has tremendously helped shape my career and which has eventually led to this book.

      I first express my profound gratitude to Dr. K.R. Padiyar, my teacher and PhD thesis supervisor at IIT Kanpur, who initiated me into power systems and FACTS, and taught me the fundamentals of how to do research and write it. He had so much to teach me, but I could learn only little due to my own limitations. It is indeed a blessing in my life to be his student.

      My sincere thanks to Dr. Narain Hingorani, the inventor of FACTS technology, who has been an enormous inspiration in my career.

      My heartfelt gratitude to Dr. M.A. Pai, who has continuously supported and encouraged me throughout my academic career and during the process of this book writing. I am immensely grateful to Late Dr. Prabha Kundur, who incessantly inspired and motivated me all along in my career, and especially so, while writing this book. My true gratitude is also due to Late Michael Henderson for his constant encouragement in my research and in this book writing.

      John Paserba has played a very important role in my career and for this book, for which I can never thank him enough. I am indebted to him for firstly reviewing the book’s manuscript and providing very meticulous comments which greatly helped in improving the book. He then very kindly agreed to write the Foreword which is indeed an enormous honor for this book.

      I also greatly appreciate Dr. Ram Adapa, Dr. Benjamin Jeyasurya, and Oleg Popovsky for reviewing the initial book proposal and graciously recommending that this book be published by Wiley/IEEE Press.

      I sincerely thank IEEE, CIGRE, Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), CEATI International Inc., Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), California ISO (CAISO), and EU‐PVSEC for providing copyright permissions to reproduce some of their material in this book.

      I am immensely grateful to Janice McMichael Dennis, President and CEO, Bluewater Power Group of Companies, and Tim Vanderheide, former Vice President, Bluewater Power, Sarnia, for their constant research support. They were extremely generous to provide their solar farm site for demonstrating my PV‐STATCOM technology for the first time in Canada, and perhaps in the world. I am further very appreciative of Bluewater Power for providing the nighttime picture of their solar farm site for PV‐STATCOM field demonstration, and ABB Asea Brown Boveri Ltd., Switzerland, for the morning picture of their solar farm, which adorn the cover of this book.

      I sincerely thank Ben Mehraban, Stephen Williams, and Dr. Hemant Barot for providing valuable insights on the practical aspects of solar PV systems and FACTS, which I have included in this book.

I convey my indebtedness to The University of Western Ontario for having me, and providing all the support and facilities for performing my research in solar PV systems and FACTS. My profound thanks to Dr. Ken McIsaac, Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, for his support for my PV solar systems research and in writing this book.

      I greatly appreciate my former MESc students Sridhar Bala Subramaniam, Mahendra A.C., Byomakesh Das, and Vishwajitsinh Atodaria; former PhD students Shah Arifur Rahman, Ehsan M. Siavashi, Hesamaldin Maleki, Reza Salehi, Mohammad Akbari, and Sibin Mohan; and former Post Doctoral Fellows Dr. Vinod Khadkikar and Dr. Iurie Axente for their research on different aspects of PV‐STATCOM technology. Each one has also helped me in a unique way in this book writing by performing some system studies included in this book, doing literature search, and drawing figures. To each one of them, individually, I express my sincere thanks.

      I wish to express my gratitude to the entire team of John Wiley & Sons led by Mary Hatcher for kindly agreeing to publish this book and for providing all the support throughout the publication process. I also wish to sincerely thank Victoria Bradshaw for developing the book cover, Teresa Netzler for supervising the book’s production, and Viniprammia Premkumar for preparing the final version of the book in such an excellent manner for printing.

      Finally, I owe this book to my wife Malini and children Sarvesh and Ratna without whose immense sacrifices, immeasurable patience, and limitless support this book would have never happened.

       Rajiv K. Varma