Fabien Chidanand Robert

When academia meets rural India: Lessons learnt from a MicroGrid implementation

Access to energy has been a lynchpin for the progress of modern civilization in the last century. However, a large fraction of the worlds population still remains without electricity. Recent improvements in affordable, renewable energy generation technology, offer us the unique opportunity to realize the dream of global electrification. In this paper, we discuss how academia can translate into successfully meeting the needs of rural development via the Live-in-Labs™ program — an experiential learning initiative in rural India. Through the program, 35 post graduate university students and 15 staff and faculty designed, developed, and deployed a solar microgrid for the electrification of a tribal village in South India. In order to encourage academia to become involved more easily in such rural development programs, we describe our approach from pre-study to post deployment analysis and monitoring. We present practical tips and advice for project organisation, technical design, as well the implementation phase, accompanied with feedback from students. This project introduced tribal villagers to a new world of technology, promoting education and kindling long lasting enthusiasm in the village and students were offered a unique hands-on experience, changing their outlook on life.

Smart device for optimal use of stored renewable power

One of the major challenges faced by Indian power grid system are the excess use of energy and that results in the imbalance in the power generated and power consumed. The utility regulates the amount of consumption by introducing power cuts and time of use billing methods leading to decrease in the comfort level of consumers. A design for a smart control device, for efficient use of stored renewable energy, is proposed in this paper. The proposed system has a number of aspects. Firstly, this proposed system collects and analyses user consumption data. Dependent on the data the system makes a decision on the source of power to be made available: either renewable power from a battery or power from the grid. The system also calculates the amount of power to be stored, in a storage device. In addition, the system is able to make decisions on who gets priority to continue receiving power in the case of power shortage/failure. We simulated some of the basic system capabilities to switch the source of power depending on: the peak time, consumption of user, and the amount of battery power remaining. The results show that dependency of power from the grid is reduced and by setting priority of device, continuity of service is achieved. Our results indicate that power dependency from the grid can be reduced to 70-80% during peak hours and continuity of service can be achieved for critical devices during power failure.

Solar electricity: An effective asset to supply urban loads in hot climates

While human population has been multiplied by four in the last hundred years, the world energy consumption was multiplied by ten. The common method of using fossil fuels to provide energy and electricity has dangerously disturbed nature’s and climate’s balance. It has become urgent and crucial to find sustainable and eco-friendly alternatives to preserve a livable environment with unpolluted air and water. Renewable energy is the unique eco-friendly opportunity known today. The main challenge of using renewable energy is to ensure the constant balance of electricity demand and generation on the electrical grid. This paper investigates whether the solar electricity generation is correlated with the urban electricity consumption in hot climates. The solar generation and total consumption have been compared for three cities in Florida. The hourly solar generation has been found to be highly correlated with the consumption that occurs 6 h later, while the monthly solar generation is correlated with the monthl...