Ashok Jhunjhunwala

This paper illustrates the Battery Life Cycle Tester with intelligent charging and discharging unit comprising of measurement, data logging, remote monitoring and communication sections for data acquisition and control. The life cycle tester switches between different charging and discharging modes making it compatible with all battery chemistries. The discharger comprises of an electronic load using MOSFETs operated in their linear region to dissipate power. The required charging/discharging profiles for various applications like electric vehicle motor load and urban drive cycle tests can be programmed via an RS485 link and the data collection is done through Ethernet with an onboard SD card for backup. The user can also set their own test profiles within given limits. The Battery Life Cycle tester is used to perform required charging and discharging profiles at the specified Depth of Discharge (DOD), temperature, State of charge (SOC), charge and discharge rates for the desired number of cycles and store the data for analysis.

A desert cooler typically is a blower fan that sucks air through a moistened surface to achieve a drop in inlet air temperature. A pump is used to circulate water from a lower tank to the evaporative pads working with a swing louver motor for directing the air automatically. The power consumption of the evaporative air cooler is primarily in single phase induction motor (SPIM) used for fan motor [1, 2]. To lower this power consumption, a brushless DC machine and its circuitry were designed and used. This is powered also by PV panel and batteries. The power consumption comparative study was carried out on SPIM and BLDC machines at three speeds. The outcome of the study shows 39.3% of power saved on with BLDC machine air coolers.

As the Leisang village in Manipur received electricity in April 2018, the prime minister of India announced that every Indian village is now electrified. A village is considered electrified in India when 10% of its homes receive electricity. However, the number of village homes that have electricity has now reached 84%, with some 41 million households still without power. This village-electrification program has been going on for many years. Until a few years back, there was a large shortage of power with power demand exceeding supply, leading to no/a weak push to extend the grid to the village. Over the last few years, when more coal power plants became operational, the supply strengthened. At the same time, the energy costs for the solar and wind powerattained grid parity, enabling the addition of significant renewable power. Simultaneously, the power grid was strengthened, and India attained a single national grid on 31 December 2013, such that power generated in surplus areas could be transported to deficit regions. All of this helped in surplus power generation because the demand did not pick up much in recent years. The social obligation to extend the electric grid to each village and then to at least 10% of its homes no longer had a fundamental bottleneck. The target-driven approach of the prime minister?s office helped to expedite the effort.

The literature on Smart Cities has not as yet paid adequate attention to the rural sector, and the potential in villages for creating smart and sustainable solutions for the 21st century. This paper focuses on linking proposed smart city strategies to smart village policies to ensure that rural youth have improved opportunities for employment through ICT initiatives to ensure digital inclusion, using primary surveys undertaken in India. The motivation was to understand how mobile telephony could be a catalyst to create Smart Villages in India, where young people can chart out new pathways to realize their aspirations with regard to tertiary education and new avenues for diversifying into rural non-agricultural employment. We use data obtained from a household survey in villages in the states of Punjab and Tamil Nadu to examine the mobile phone usage preferences of rural educated youth to identify the way forward in improving the accessibility of services on the supply side. We make the case that where youth are using mobile phone access to increase their social information base it is indeed possible that the new social media groups formed by rural youth become a powerful conduit for generating new employment opportunities. The key to accessing this solution is to use a demand driven model for mobile services that would permit a bottom of governance model to generate sustainable growth of enterprises and improved human development of these villages.

It is well established that access to energy is closely linked with socioeconomic development. India houses the largest share of the world's population deprived of electricity with about 237 million people lacking access (International Energy Agency). At the same time, in India, many households that do have access to electricity lack an uninterrupted and quality power supply. A recent study conducted by the Council for Energy, Environment, and Water (CEEW) across six states (Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, and Odisha), found that about 50% of the households had no electricity despite having a grid connection. This indicates that there is an immediate need to address the quality, affordability, and reliability of the power supply in addition to extending the grid footprint.

According to a recent report by the International Energy Agency [1], although India is the second most populous country on earth, it ranks far behind other countries in terms of per capita electricity consumption and carbon footprint. As shown in Table 1, India is well below the world average in both per capita electricity consumption and carbon footprint indices. However, with an ambitious plan for rapid growth and economic development, India is poised to quickly increase its carbon footprint and become a major contributor to preventing global climate change.

Over the last few years, electric vehicles (EVs) have captured the imagination of people in many parts of the world. Approximately 1.1 million passenger EVs (cars) were sold in 2017, up by about 57% from the previous years. China contributed 600,000 vehicles, the United States had 200,000 and Europe 125,000. EV sales in Norway constituted 50% of all vehicle sales. Several nations have announced that their vehicles will be fully electric by 2025, 2030, or 2040. General Motors, Ford, Toyota, Volkswagen, and others demonstrated their EV ambitions by making major EV announcements, while Chinese automakers like BAIC and Changan announced they will sell only EVs after 2025. According to Bloomberg, the global EV sales will grow by 40% in 2018. U.S. sales are expected to exceed 300,000 units, and European sales should reach around 400,000, with Germany as the leader. China will lead the way in four-wheeled vehicle as well as electric bus sales. Beijing has committed to completely switch over its taxi fleet of around 70,000 vehicles by 2020. Moreover, by the end of 2018, charging infrastructure is expected to constitute almost 700,000 stations.

Lighting, fans and electronic devices form a significant and growing portion of power-load at homes and need power back-up support in case there are frequent power-cuts. A Diesel generator is generally used today in multi-storied buildings to provide this backup. The DC system, proposed in this paper, provides a far more energy-efficient alternative using renewable power-source for backup. It creates a pull for a home to move towards far more energy efficient DC loads. The solution provides a GREEN option to the existing solution. This paper provides a fresh perspective on the problem of eliminating conversion losses for uninterrupted operation of DC appliances. A cost benefit analysis shows that this DC system can reduce costs to the consumer by eliminating the complex electronics embedded in the inversion process. A rough measurement of the conversion losses for commercially available inverters and battery chargers illustrates that gains of 30% to 45% are easily obtainable

India is a power deficit country and one third of its homes are off grid or near off grid. This paper presents an efficient and affordable Solar DC solution for powering such homes. Though several solutions have emerged in the past for powering these homes, those have been expensive and energy inefficient. These solutions rely on several DC to AC and AC to DC conversions, to feed the widely used AC home loads, thus, wasting a large chunk of the expensive power. The proposed Solar DC solution for off-grid homes (OGH) is developed to use the generated PV power efficiently. With this solution, the panel and battery size is reduced by 2 to 2.5 times and the cost to power a house is reduced to nearly half the cost of the existing solutions. The paper also presents a techno-economic comparison between the proposed OGH solution with some existing solar systems.

Coal and Renewables (especially solar and wind) are likely to dominate India’s energy mix for quite some time. India is blessed with solar radiation in most parts of the country, and costs are falling rapidly. It is conceivable that power-generation using renewables is likely to come close to 50% by 2030. While this could be great for India, the intermittent power-generation through wind and solar would imply that power-available may fluctuate. Battery Storage could be an answer. Even though cost of Battery Storage is falling rapidly, grid-level storage to arrest power-generation fluctuation would push the prices of electric power beyond “affordability” in India. The other answer is demand side load-management to significantly off-set the supply variation without impacting living and working style significantly. The paper briefs on design of power-system in multi-storied commercial complexes, which would make its electrical load respond to power-surplus and power-deficit scenarios on the grid. When the grid has surplus power, the building would consume power to its full extent, but when there is power-deficit, it will consume minimally. Such buildings are being built today, and if tariffs are designed to benefit commercial complexes which adhere to the above principal, their adoption would be speeded up. The key is that it would benefit the grid, while benefitting the commercial complexes. Besides presenting the concept and designs of power-systems in such buildings, the paper presents some simulation results and some initial measurements on power-consumed in different situations in one such building. The paper also presents some initial idea on how this approach can be extended to powering entire residential and commercial sector.