Recent years have seen a dramatic growth in the applications of synchrotron radiation (SR) to powder diffraction measurements. Powder diffraction beamlines at synchrotron user facilities offer advantages of intensity, resolution and tunability, relative to conventional X-ray generators. Powder diffraction with monochromatic SR now allows structure determinations for compounds of moderate complexity. Energy-dispersive diffraction with white beam is well suited to the study of polycrystalline materials over a wide range of temperatures, high pressures or to time-resolved studies. SR powder diffraction has also been used for a variety of experiments where high accuracy of data is important, including deformation densities and space-group resolution. In this paper, after describing the unique features of SR that are of importance for powder diffraction and basic instrumentation, some recent applications exploiting the unique properties of SR are given.