UK-India Joint Virtual Clean Energy Centre Conference held in Loughborough
The UK-India Joint Virtual Clean Energy Centre (JVCEC) Conference was held on 18-20 September 2018 in Loughborough, UK. Hosted by Loughborough University, the event was a joint conference organised by JUICE (Joint UK-India Clean Energy Centre), IUCERCE (India-UK Centre for Education and Research in Clean Energy) and UKICERI (UK-India Clean Energy Research Institute) and funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), which is now part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), and the Indian Department of Science and Technology (DST).
Attendees included some forty Indian academics from Bombay, Kharagpur, Kanpur, Delhi, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Jaipur, Karaikudi, Bhubaneswar, Shibpur, Madras, Nagpur, Roorkee, Thiruvananthapuram and Tezpur, and over forty UK academics and researchers from Loughborough, Imperial, Exeter, Southampton, Manchester, Birmingham, Swansea, Cardiff and Warwick.
The conference was opened by Prof Robert Allison, Vice Chancellor of Loughborough University. Dr A Mukhopadhyay, Head of Infrastructure in DST then outlined the context of the collaborative programme from the Indian perspective. Dr JBV Reddy from DST, Dr James Dracott from EPSRC-UKRI and Mr Asgar Qadri from UKRI-India also participated in the event.
The Principal Investigators of the three centres, Dr Murray Thomson (JUICE), Dr Prakash Ghosh (IUCERCE) and Prof Chandan Chakraborty (UKICERI), gave overviews of activities within their centres.
The conference ran over three days. In the first two days, the programme included joined-up ‘double-act’ presentations where UK and India partners jointly presented their collaborative work tackling many challenges in the Clean Energy Research. In the final day, chaired by DST and UKRI-India, an India-UK Smart Energy Grids and Energy Storage (SEGES) Workshop was held and academics from Manchester, Bath and Nottingham universities were welcomed. In the workshop, the outcomes of five completed or near-completed India-UK SEGES projects were presented by India and UK teams. This was followed by a discussion session where the future opportunities for collaborative research in Clean Energy field between the two countries were explored.
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_Conference Programme_Sep2018
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 and developing 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 held in Jaipur, India in September 2019.