Project Summary
There are still over one billion people worldwide lacking access to energy. We, through the ANRGI project, want to contribute to making an impact by innovating in technologies that make distributed energy resources, such as photovoltaic microgrids, to be scalable and sustainable.
ANRGI stands for accessible, natural, renewable, growth, and interaction/implementation. The project has three overarching objectives namely a drastic increase of energy access in remote areas via microgrids, a reduction of losses and waste of energy, and a natural replacement of combustion scooters with electric alternatives. These are to be achieved through a radical improvement of power quality.
A lot of research has been performed on the development of renewable energy sources and storage and efficient power conversion. By optimizing these systems to real-life situations and reducing the complexity of interconnecting networks, the possibility of natural growing grids arises and this is required for achieving universal electricity access.
Conventional smart-grid research is founded on large distribution grids with a huge diversity of loads and control in the minute range. We need a paradigm shift for microgrids for remote areas and island configurations. Modern electronic equipment creates non-linear effects in the (sub)-millisecond range, which creates a drastic decrease in efficiency due to over-dimensioning of apparent power with respect the real power. Furthermore, large consumers can temporarily cause a peak in energy demand requiring costly over-dimensioning.
Energy is ubiquitous and acceptance of renewable energy is based on costs. ANRGI aims at increasing affordability, decreasing the cost of ownership, and improving the quality of supply. ANRGI will connect to the existing initiatives and programs on energy access and raise awareness for students and the general public. We want to introduce novel technologies to improve power quality and implement low-cost measurement techniques enabling energy sharing and adaptive growth. ANRGI will merge energy suppliers and energy consumers to allow accessible and available energy that is affordable, efficient, and clean. Concerning the implementation, ANRGI will investigate how to manage technology innovations to be adopted in remote rural areas.
Our project is implemented using case studies of microgrid systems in Indonesia, partnering with a local university and private companies.
Participating PE Members
