claudiaReliability and Efficient System for Community Energy Solutions (RESCUES) is a medium size Academia-Industry partnership aimed at developing smart grid (SG) with optimum sensible storage solutions for rural communities across UK and India.

The reliability of supply  in both UK and Indian remote areas is a major problem. In India, 25 million rural households still are without electricity, and up to 4-5 hours of daily load shedding occurs in major cities. In UK, 17.2% of rural households still are fuel poor, with difficult restoration of power supply;  furthermore, in coastal areas, weekend’s leisure activities demand more energy.

Despite their considerable diversity, there are commonalities for both UK and India remote areas, which call for urgent action, such as the intermittency of local power resources, the need of energy storage for off-grid electrification, the technical problems related to on-grid power supply.

This situation calls for the immediate intervention of scientists and industry. In this respect, the RESCUES consortium, drawing in experts from each of these technical areas, proposes to undertake fundamental technical research to use innovation and advanced technologies to make a community grid a reality. The overarching aim of this proposal is to invent appropriate, cost effective, scalable, secure and reliable local energy system.

Four prototype laboratory based systems will be designed tested and validated to reflect four different geographical and climate situations influencing the resource availability and consumption trends.

This research is supported by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

Website: http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/NGBOViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/K03619X/1

Principal Investigator:

Pal, Prof. Bikash, Imperial College London, b.pal@imperial.ac.uk

Other Investigators:     

Project Partners:           

  • Alstom Group   
  • E.On