Page 166 - AWSAR 2.0
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142 || AWSAR Awarded Popular Science Stories - 2019
“But, what has led us here?” Not the fact that we are progressing and using more electricity, but the fact that we are using more and more fossil fuels to produce electricity and that somewhere in the race to develop and progress, we lost touch with ‘sustainability’. India has gracefully transitioned from a stage wherepowerrestorationfollowingeveryevent of power cut was a celebrated occasion to emerging as the third largest producer of electricity with 99.7% electricity coverage. Moreover, today the Indian building sector is already consuming close to 40%of the total electricity, which is expected to increase to a significant 76% by 2040. Thus, the emergence of buildings as major energy consumers also raises an opportunity which empowers us to help the global energy crisis situation, by managing the building-level energy flows. I asked myself, “So, how can I contribute?” This thought has led to my doctoral thesis in developing smart building energy management
system (BEMS) solutions
which empower and educate
energy consumers, and
make them aware of their
consumption. BEMS facilitates
the optimization of building
energy consumption, and
enhancement of the energy
efficiency of the building
sector. Appropriately, BEMS is
gradually emerging as a prime
component of demand-side
management technologies in
the modern electric grid.
It is worth mentioning that
the major amount of electricity
used by a building is to meet its
thermal (heating/cooling) load.
Generation of this electricity
by traditional means results in
dissipation of significant amount of waste heat. Combined heat and power (CHP) generation
has been widely deployed at small-scales to enhance the overall utilization efficiency by recovering the waste heat output of generators, along with the electrical output. Traditionally, fossil fuels have been employed as the major source for CHP operation. However, with the adoption of sustainable development goals, and subsequent efforts to reduce carbon footprints, cleaner sources of energy have beenidentifiedformicro-levelheatandpower generation, known as micro-CHP (mCHP). Owing to zero carbon emissions, low noise, good part-load performance, fuel cells have been deployed in some countries like Japan, South Korea and several European nations for mCHP operation at the district and building levels for space heating purposes. India, on the contrary, has an enormous amount of cooling load (which eventually led us to the blackouts of 2012) and mCHP appears as a highly efficient solution to building heat and
power needs.
A challenge that exists
in deployment of a mCHP generating unit is that they have a fixed power to heat ratio, that is, the output of the unit either follows its electrical load or its heat (thermal) load. Accordingly, the operational modes of mCHP are flexibilized by suitable multi-energy storages for which a coordinating strategy has been developed. It controls the electrical and thermal outputs of the mCHP unit and the suitable energy storage units, while maintaining the thermal comfort of the user. Moreover, the wide availability of the solar resource in India provides the
opportunity to utilize solar energy for electrical as well as thermal needs. Thus, deploying
   Transportation sector constitutes a major part of these energy demands and we have been relying upon imported crude oil and the fuels derived from it to meet them. However, the crude oil is available only in limited quantity under the earth’s crust. Further, burning of the fuels derived from the crude-oil results in emission of several harmful compounds in the atmosphere leading to air pollution.
  





































































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