A famous proverb ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’ explains how this world reached the peak of development and innovation, the future generation will be the witness of much more than it is today.

Usage of a different kind of energy changed the world completely and rapidly, it is worth mentioning that the invention of electricity brought a whole new era in the world, revolution and industrialization came into existence due to electricity. Now we are advancing to the digital age. Till now we achieved a lot, but still, we need to gain more and more towards the prosperity of human being. Ongoing pandemic brought a significant impact in the digital world, more than 80% of professionals and students experienced the whole new working and learning environment. People experienced the digital world mode of business, trade and study and shifted to digital platforms like Zoom, Teams Slack, Whatsapp and many others. Usage of artificial intelligence, the internet of things and data analytics are observed in important sectors especially in the IT world. As per NITI Ayog’s report National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence, many industries are proactively investing in cognitive and AI solutions, with global investments expected to achieve a compound annual growth rate of 50.1% reaching $57.6 billion in 2021.

The modern power grid is an engineering miracle and supplies power to billions of people. The annihilations of fossil fuel are anticipated in near future. However, energy production through fossil fuel increases environmental pollution, global warming, and has an adverse effect on ecological enthalpy. However, the uncertainty in fuel prices and rapid growth in energy demand also plays their role to produce energy through alternate resources, which are environmentally friendly. So, renewable energy (RE) gets a lot of attention. Among the RE resources, photo-voltaic and wind energy have rapid development nowadays.

Power generation through wind turbines is vastly adopted by Nordic states. Due to high wind speed, the prices of the electricity go below zero and voltage at the coupling bus increases up to an insecure level (>5%) which is alarming for the stability of the power system. In order to mitigate these issues, the energy storage system is one of the best solutions. But the capital cost is much higher to install such a project. Another option is to utilize electric vehicles (EVs) energy storage because their energy capacity ranges from 52-100 kWh. However, it’s an idea that needs extensive studies and research to make it practical.

The integration of renewable energy-based generation in power system is a challenging task sustaining the grid stability and delivering quality. The conventional techniques fail because of the complexity and intermittence of renewable energy. The power system operator used the supercomputer for optimization of power system operation. In near future, a generating PV system with energy storage is the part of every house and backyard wind turbines will be installed in villages. It is impossible for operators to coordinate with millions of distributed systems using traditional computational systems.

The only possible solution is to integrate AI into the modern grid. However, it is based on three new technologies:
1. For the prediction of demand and supply, a machine learning algorithm can be used.
2. Cloud computing can be used for the optimization of power generation.
3. IOT based structure is developed to monitor and regulate the connected renewable energy resources.

Hussain Sarwar Khan

Project Researcher/Doctoral Student
School of Technology and Innovations