2nd UK-India Joint Virtual Clean Energy Centre Conference held in Jaipur, India
The 2nd UK-India Joint Virtual Clean Energy Centre (JVCEC) Conference was held on 12-14 September 2019 in Jaipur, India. Hosted by Malaviya National Institute of Technology (MNIT) Jaipur, the event was a joint conference organised by UKICERI (UK-India Clean Energy Research Institute), IUCERCE (India-UK Centre for Education and Research in Clean Energy) and JUICE (Joint UK-India Clean Energy Centre), and funded by the Indian Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), which is part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).
Attendees included some 60 Indian academics from Kharagpur, Bombay, Kanpur, Delhi, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Jaipur, Bhubaneswar, Shibpur, Madras, Thiruvananthapuram and Tezpur, and 20 UK academics and researchers from Loughborough, Imperial, Exeter, Southampton, Manchester, Birmingham, and Warwick.
Hosted by the outstanding MNIT Jaipur team lead by Prof Jyotirmay Mathur and Dr Rohit Bhakar, the conference was opened by Prof Uday Kumar Yaragatti, Director of MNIT Jaipur. Dr S Bajpai, Head of Technology Missions Division (Energy, Water and all Other) in DST then outlined the context of the collaborative programme from the Indian perspective. Dr Monika Sharma, Newton Fund Delivery Programme Manager in UKRI-India provided an overview of how the initiative was developed from very early stages and has become a fully functioning collaborative UK-India clean energy consortium as it is today. Dr JBV Reddy from DST also attended the event. Invited by the DST, a group of experts also participated in the event and took part in the discussions, including Prof. S C Srivastava (IIT Kanpur), Dr S Venugopalan (Battery Division, Power System Group, ISRO Satellite Centre), R A Deshpande (CPRI, India), Shri Arun Kumar Mishra (Director, NSGM, SAUDAMINI), Dr B K Bhatt (MNRE), Prof. D Thukaram (IISc Bangalore), and Rajesh Kumar (PGCIL India).
The Principal Investigators of the three centres, Prof Chandan Chakraborty (UKICERI), Dr Prakash Ghosh (IUCERCE) and Dr Murray Thomson (JUICE) gave overviews of collaborative activities within the three centres.
The conference programme included 23 joined-up ‘double-act’ presentations where UK and India partners jointly presented their collaborative work tackling many challenges in the Clean Energy Research. This was followed by a discussion session where experts and funders offered their feedback and the consortium leads conveyed their perspective on the future opportunities for collaborative research in Clean Energy between the two countries.
In parallel to the oral presentations, poster presentations in Clean Energy Research by the partners in the three centres were also available throughout the duration of the conference.
The detailed programme and a list of poster presentations could be found here:
JVCEC India UK Conference Program Sept_2019
JVCEC List of Posters Sep 2019
The conference brought together the leading academics in the Clean Energy field from the UK and India and enabled valuable discussions on key challenges and collaborative work in the integration of solar PV, energy storage and electrical networks. Presentations of ongoing collaborations between UK and Indian academics within the three centres, JUICE, IUCERCE and UKICERI, helped strengthen the existing links and identify emerging possibilities for collaboration between the two countries in Clean Energy.
The next UK-India Joint Virtual Clean Energy Centre (JVCEC) Conference will be hosted by University of Exeter in Cornwall, UK, in July 2020.