IIT-Roorkee working on smart grid

IIT-Roorkee is part of an Indo-US consortium working on a mega project for smart energy distribution system.

The $ 75 million project, called US-India collaboration for Smart Distribution System with Storage (UI-ASSIST), is part of the Indo-US Joint Clean Energy Research and Development Center (JCERDC) and will work towards addressing pertinent issues related to the adoption and deployment of smart grids, including storage in the distribution network.

One of the most important aspects of this project is to bridge the gap between smart grid, storage and renewable energy research in order to facilitate its subsequent adoption.

IIT-Roorkee has been awarded a grant of Rs. 417.52 lakh. The consortium will be divided into two teams, the Indian Core team and the US Core team.

The Indian Core team comprises IIT-Kanpur, IIT-Roorkee, IIT-Delhi, IIT-Madras, IIT-Bhubaneshwar and The Energy Resource Institute, New Delhi. The US Core team comprises Washington State University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Texas A&M University.

Speaking about the smart grid project, Prof N P Padhy of IIT-Roorkee said: “In 2012, India, in its peak summers, had to experience a serious blackout where the entire country was under dark for three days, except the southern part. This led to lot of socio-economic problems in the life of people across the nation.

The reason for this was an increase in demand and cascading failure of generators. In spite of understanding the importance of renewable energy, it is not possible to have large-scale integration of renewable to the main grid due to its limited capacity. Thus, the concept of Microgrid has gained a lot of interest in recent days.”