Electric Vehicles and Micro Grid Technologies

Both Electric Vehicles and/or Micro Grid directly or indirectly have a large role to play in solving the two major challenges the world is facing today viz.rapid depletion of fossil fuels which are our major conventional energy sources today and the consequent impact of their use on the environmental pollution, the main cause for the degradation of a healthy ecological life on earth. 

Accordingly, there has been a continuous R&D activity the world over to promote the growth of Electric Vehicles and Nonconventional Energy sources to combat the above two challenges. Electrical Vehicles(EV) as an alternative to IC engines based automobiles which depend upon diesel/petrol and Micro Grids to effectively link the two major Non conventional Energy sources viz. Solar and Wind Power Generating stations to the national grid.

If we look at the technologies that are inherent in these two major systems, they are mostly dependent on the ever developing branch of engineering i.e. Electrical Engineering.

Few such technological challenges in development of EVs are:

  • Development of High energy Storage systems and batteries with low weight/volume to energy ratio
  • Development of High efficiency, low Inertia, low maintenance, high power to weight/volume ratio Electric motors
  • To ultimately achieve a longer run with a single charge
  • Development of efficient and low cost electric charging infrastructure with quick and high energy charging capability which can be setup easily.

And few such technological challenges in Micro grid are:

  • Development of low cost low power electrical subsystems like transformers, switchgear and protection devices for use in the remote areas where mostly the distributed Solar and Wind energy systems are located.
  • Evolving and introducing effective and safe bidirectional power transmission strategies/protocols in the micro grids for both linking the power to the major grid as well as to utilize the power in local load centers depending on the power availability from local generating stations.
  • Utilization of the state of the art real time SCADA systems to carry out the above task effectively and efficiently.

The vision of our MRU is to strive continuously to develop the branch of Electrical Engineering so as to bring out students capable of meeting such technical challenges and to fill the gap between the need of the Society and development in Engineering & Technology.

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