Introduction

As part of the members in Paris Agreement, Malaysian government is committed to reduce the national carbon footprint and achieve a carbon-free living society in the near future. In conjunction to this ambition, the National Automotive Policy 2020 (NAP 2020) has targeted to transform the Malaysian automotive industry into an Electric Vehicle (EV) interoperability center by year 2030.

Recently, 450 million budgets were invested to electrify the Malaysian public transport sector. Hence, EV will be widely deployed due to its sustainable characteristic to benefit the transportation industry. From the power system perspective, the existing power grid is not designed to cater for this massive additional EV charging demand, which may lead to various technical grid impacts, especially grid voltage drop.

This situation will definitely urge the market demand of smart EV charging solutions. Therefore, a smart EV charger with embedded grid voltage regulation feature was developed. This intelligent charging technology offers safe and quality charging power to EV batteries, as well as regulating the power grid voltage during charging of EVs at minimal investment costs.

Technology Feature

This smart EV charging technology has been successfully developed by a team of energy, power electronics and power quality experts in the Power Quality Research Lab, Universiti Tenaga Nasional. The charger prototype connects a lithium-ion battery to the power grid for charging purposes, while regulating the power grid voltage. Experiment has proven the practicality and feasibility of this smart charging technology in providing safe and reliable charging process for both power grid and EV user. The features of this state-of-the-art technology include:

• Provide safe charging power to protect EV battery health using Constant Current/Reduce Constant Current (CC/RCC) charging technique.
• Solve power grid voltage drop problem during charging of EVs using smart voltage regulation feature in the designed charger.
• Cost-effective solution as this intelligent charging strategy requires minimal alteration on the physical configuration of the existing charger.

Market Potential

The electric-powered automotive technology has evolved significantly in the past few years. According to the EV Global Outlook 2019, 1.26 million global EV sales were achieved. This marked the largest increment among every other automotive category.

Nevertheless, the growth of EV industry will eventually lead to a tremendous increment of electricity demand for vehicle charging. Hence, maintaining the reliability and quality of power grid supply to cope with the additional EV charging demand is crucial. Smart charging solutions shall be implemented to prevent power outages or supply interruptions, which can lead to loss of billions dollars.

For the purposes of preserving the benefits of both power utility and EV users, the proposed smart charging technology is capable of simultaneously regulating the power grid voltage and providing safe charging power to the EV batteries.

Next Step

Protection of Intellectual Property

Introduction

Electricity is one of the vital input to support everyday activities. As a residential dwelling, it is crucial to monitor the level of electricity consumption mainly by changing their behaviour because it will influence the amount of utility cost and cost of living.. The “smart meter” is one of mechanism that can be used to track the residential electricity consumption, however it is still in the early stage of development and the existing one is far from perfect. The dELCO app was developed to assess the behaviour change of the residential consumer toward electricity utilizing the extended planned behaviour theory introduced by experts. It may help the domestic consumer to categorize where they stand as a consumer, either with positive or negative behaviour. Based on that indicator, consumer paves the way for adequate consumption, save their money, reduce their cost of living and save the planet earth from global warming.

Technology Feature

The dELCO app can help consumer estimate and measure their behaviour towards electricity usage: ”

1. The questionnaire contains 18 items, and it was designed to measure consumer , knowledge, awareness, energy efficiency and energy saving practices.
2. It comes with score, and the score interpretation is also provided at the end of the assessment.

The novelty of dELCO are:

• Due to limitation of smart meters, this app is a smart option to be used to measure and estimate the electricity consumption.
• the electricity consumption. q It is a user-friendly cloud application where the consumer can measure their positive and negative behaviour towards electricity consumption.

Market Potential

The smart meter market witnessed a shipment of approximately 136.45 million units of smart meters globally in 2020 and is estimated to reach 198.53 million units by 2026, registering a CAGR of 6.6% for the forecast period.

The dELCO app has market potential in:

• Residential dwelling
• Sustainable Energy Development Authority
• Ministry of Energy And Natural Resources
• Ministry of Housing and Local Government

Next Step

Protection of Intellectual Property