Investigation of energy storage systems, its advantage and requirement in various locations in Australia

Storage minimizes the intermittent nature of renewable sources. Solar and wind are the two fostered source of renewable energy. However, the availability of useful solar radiation and wind speed varies with geographical locations, and also the duration of this energy sources varies with seasonal variation. With the available vast open land and geographical position, Australia has great potential for both solar and wind energies. However, both these sources require energy buffering to support load demand to ensure required power quality. Electricity demand is increasing gradually, and also Australia has target to achieve 20% electricity from renewable sources by 2020. For effective utilization of solar and wind energy potential location of these sources needs to be identified, and effective size of storage needs to be estimated for best utilization according to the load demand. Therefore this paper investigated wind speed and solar radiation data of 210 locations in Australia, identified the potential locations, and estimated required storage in various potential locations to support residential load demand. Advantages of storage were analyzed in terms of loading on distribution transformer and storage support during energy fluctuation from renewable energy. Further analysis showed that storage greatly reduces greenhouse gas emission and reduces overall cost of energy by maximizing the use of solar and wind energies

Integration of renewable energy resources into the distribution network : a review on required power quality

Power quality is the critical element of modern power system network where more and more distributed energy resources (DER) can be found. Distributed generation, generates electricity from many small DER particularly from renewable sources. Distributed generator (DG) within the network from renewable energy resources (RER) like solar and wind, bring significant challenges to maintain acceptable power quality (PQ) at the consumer end. This paper investigates PQ issues associated with RER. It reviews existing PQ standards for distribution network (DN) and also summarized the experiences of several Distributed Network Service Provider (DNSP) while integrating DGs into the grid. It was found that few PQ parameter ranges varies in different standards due to lack of harmonization and that may hinder to accept bulk renewable energy into the grid

Estimation of energy storage and its feasibility analysis

Storage significantly adds flexibility in Renewable Energy (RE) and improves energy management. This chapter explains the estimation procedures of required storage with grid connected RE to support for a residential load. It was considered that storage integrated RE will support all the steady state load and grid will support transient high loads. This will maximize the use of RE. Proper sized RE resources with proper sized storage is essential for best utilization of RE in a cost effective way. This chapter also explains the feasibility analysis of storage by comparing the economical and environmental indexes

Review of Electric Vehicle Charging Technologies, Configurations, and Architectures

Electric Vehicles (EVs) are projected to be one of the major contributors to energy transition in the global transportation due to their rapid expansion. The EVs will play a vital role in achieving a sustainable transportation system by reducing fossil fuel dependency and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, high level of EVs integration into the distribution grid has introduced many challenges for the power grid operation, safety, and network planning due to the increase in load demand, power quality impacts and power losses. An increasing fleet of electric mobility requires the advanced charging systems to enhance charging efficiency and utility grid support. Innovative EV charging technologies are obtaining much attention in recent research studies aimed at strengthening EV adoption while providing ancillary services. Therefore, analysis of the status of EV charging technologies is significant to accelerate EV adoption with advanced control strategies to discover a remedial solution for negative grid impacts, enhance desired charging efficiency and grid support. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the current deployment of EV charging systems, international standards, charging configurations, EV battery technologies, architecture of EV charging stations, and emerging technical challenges. The charging systems require a dedicated converter topology, a control strategy and international standards for charging and grid interconnection to ensure optimum operation and enhance grid support. An overview of different charging systems in terms of onboard and off-board chargers, AC-DC and DC-DC converter topologies, and AC and DC-based charging station architectures are evaluated

Exploring Teaching and Learning Experience during COVID-19 Pandemic in Engineering Education

The education system is continuously modernizing by accommodating the need due to the industrial revolution. Various teaching modes are also introduced including a diverse range of students, particularly in engineering education. The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted normal education worldwide, forced to shut down campus activity for an extended period which forced Universities to adopt alternative approaches to continue student’s academic year. Engineering education faced significant challenges to find a realistic substitution for lab-based hands-on activity as well as group or team-based learning experiences. It is therefore very important to know the challenges and ways to address them. This paper evaluates the teaching and learning experiences observed in engineering education in Australia and abroad during the COVID-19 period compared to the pre-COVID period. The key motivation of this study is to identify key challenges arises due to COVID-19, develop Teaching & Learning (T & L) approaches to address these challenges and evaluate the effectiveness of the applied changes in the T & L approach, identify shortcomings, and find ways to improve them. The student feedback on selected engineering units have been collected from Deakin and Murdoch university in Australia to evaluate the performances of the applied changes. This data is considered as an authentic source of information to compare and identify the key challenges and effectiveness for students’ learning in pre-COVID and during COVID condition. This study later explored various literatures to gather experiences from other universities across the globe and by analysing all findings including academic experiences finally developed constructive recommendations for improvement. It is found that the current form of online mode of teaching has room to improve further as one segment of students finds it challenging and some others like a few approaches. It is also found that the online infrastructure, staff skills to innovate new unit designs, and motivating students are the other challenging areas. Therefore, a new teaching and learning framework is required to overcome all the challenges for future learning

Role of energy storage on distribution transformer loading in low voltage distribution network

Copyright © 2013 Mohammad Taufiqul Arif et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Energy storage (ES) is a form of media that store one form of energy to be utilized at another time. Importance of ES is comprehended while intermittent nature of renewable energy (RE) generation increases and integration into the grid becomes viable in terms of economics and environment. However, technical analysis should be carried out before large scale integration into the grid. Some utilities experienced in Europe and expressed concern about issues in integrating large scale renewable energy in the areas of harmonics, voltage regulation, network protection and islanding. In Austra-lia, distribution network (DN) is not robust compared to the European grid; moreover loads are largely distributed over large geographical areas. Installation of RE such as roof top solar photovoltaic (PV) is increasing in Australia which also boosted by the governments incentives to the individual owners. It is therefore obvious that large scale PV integra-tion into the Australian grid is imminent. The intermittent characteristic of solar PV is expected to have greater impacts on DN in Australia compared to the DN in Europe. Therefore this paper investigated the impacts of solar PV on low voltage (LV) DN where loads connected through distribution transformer (DT) and finally further investigation was conducted with the deployment of ES into the respective load centers. It was found that storage reduced the overall pea

Online Model Parameter and State of Charge Estimation of Li-ion Battery using Unscented Kalman Filter Considering Effects of Temperatures and C-rates

This paper proposed a technique for online modeling and state of charge (SoC) estimation of Li-ion batteries considering the effects of operating temperatures and C-rates. The proposed battery model, which is updated in real-time, is incorporated with the unscented Kalman filter (UKF) for accurate and online SoC estimation. In the proposed technique, Thevenin-based equivalent circuit model of Li-ion battery is used. Each of the RC networks of the Thevenin model is represented as a first-order linear time invariant (LTI) system. The offline RC parameters are extracted as the parameters of the first-order LTI system using the final value theorem. Then the offline RC parameters are converted to the online model parameters compensating the effects of operating temperatures and C-rates. Finally, the UKF technique is augmented with the proposed online battery model for higher accurate and online SoC estimation. An experimental setup has been developed in the LabVIEW platform to validate the proposed battery model and apply it for online SoC estimation. The proposed technique has been rigorously validated in the laboratory under hybrid pulse power characterization (HPPC) and federal urban driving schedule (FUDS) tests under wide range of varying operating temperatures and C-rates In the HPPC test,the SoC estimated using the proposed technique has a maximum absolute relative percentage error (ARPE) of less than 2%, whereas the battery model that does not account for temperature and Crate effects has a maximum ARPE of 8.79 percent, which is 4.30 times higher than the proposed technique. The proposed approach yielded mean ARPE of 0.30%, 1.02%, and 0.81% in the FUDS test at 25°, 0°, and 40°, respectively, which is performed in dynamic identical C-rates. Furthermore, higher accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed technique have been validated under the presence of white and coloured measurement noises