Engineering researchers Ujjwal Datta, Akhtar Kalam and Juan Shi produced a series of research reports addressing issues of clean and affordable energy. The researchers addressed the technical challenges of managing an electricity grid drawing on hybrid renewable energy sources of solar and wind power plants by designing a battery energy storage system to control grid loss of charge and to enable charge recovery. The battery energy storage system, in conjunction with a smart coordinated control of photovoltaic, also has applications for electric vehicle charging stations, to avoid the problem of overloading. They also investigated the financial and environmental implications of rooftop photo voltaic installation in a case study of commercial buildings in Bangladesh.
Applying mathematics to the problem of clean energy, Seyed Morteza Alizadeh, Sakineh Sadeghipour, Cagil Ozansoy and Akhtar Kalam presented a new voltage stability model in Developing a Mathematical Model for Wind Power Plant Siting and Sizing in Distribution Networks, for two common types of Wind Turbine Generators, to enable design engineers to predict how voltage will behave in different conditions.
The Centre of Policy Studies examined the Economic Implications of Global Energy Interconnection to quantify the economic implications of the proposed Global Electricity Interconnection (GEI) electricity system. Modelling results suggest that, by 2050, the GEI network will benefit all regions and will increase world GDP by 0.33 per cent, as well as contributing to sustainable energy and a reduction in green house gas emissions.
The Victorian Energy Policy Centre (VEPC) at VU has established that new forms of renewable energy generation are much cheaper than traditional energy sources. Bruce Mountain and Steven Percy of VEPC found that solar, wind and other forms of renewable energy sources are much lower in cost for the supply of electricity compared to coal, gas, hydro or nuclear electric power.
