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LUMS Energy Institute

The Energy Institute at LUMS serves as a think tank, center of technical excellence, knowledge network, and capacity building ground for the nation to institutionalize a renewable rich future for Pakistan in the most sustainable and cost-effective way possible.

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The main approach for this project it to match the demand of electricity with the available supply using techniques such as Intelligent Forecasting of both the demand and the supply and AI-based Demand Site Management system. This allows us to develop a relatively cheaper way to solve the energy problem and slowly shift towards renewable energy resolving the medium term and short term problems linked with wind and solar energy sources.

One major research project is introduction of electric vehicles in Pakistan. Due to high carbon emission of fossil fuel vehicles and high cost of importing fuel for such vehicles, the need of introducing an alternative is imperative. This project provides us with efficient policies to integrate electric vehicles in our transportation sector and locations for charging infrastructures. However, with the development of such stations, the demand of electricity further increase.

A number of research projects are under way in the institute including detection of non technical losses within the distribution system. One of the most harmful issue in Pakistan is the theft of electricity which causes a number of issues such as increased electricity prices, load shedding and circular debt. The technique used was to detect theft of electricity in Lahore, Punjab utilising the electricity consumption of randomly selected customers of LESCO. Further installation of AMI smart meters in suspicious households will allow us to monitor their activities more closely and reduce these losses.

Punjab has low hydro and wind potential but has tremendous opportunity to utilise their solar energy to fulfil the increasing demand of electricity. This research provides best locations to install utility-scale power plants as well as economical costs including capital, maintenance and operation cost for such plants. The main focus of this research was for solar power plants to provide at least 30% energy by 2030 to the province.

Due to excessive variation in the availability of renewable energy such as wind and solar, a solution is proposed in this research where scheduled loading shedding is introduced in industries with semi-flexible loads at demand site using AMI.

There is a worldwide focus on the electrification of developing regions, as is evident from the sustainable development goals (SDGs) of the United Nations. There are still more than 1 billion people worldwide with no access to electricity out of who over 30 million are in Pakistan. Our developed system allows peer-to-peer sharing of electricity along with integration/aggregation of solar generation in individual houses to be used for community applications on need-basis or in predefined scenarios. A communication layer overseas the local generation, local storage, entire bi-directional exchange of energy, and thresholds the power usage, as needed or subscribed. The possibility of electricity theft is negligible as every node is monitored through a central system. Further, ability to provide power for larger communal loads without the requirement for large dedicated generation is available through extracting the benefit of usage diversity.

The performance of solar PV systems are highly dependent on the irradiance profile (amount of sunlight), soiling, shading, temperature effects, module technology, inverter selection, string orientation etc. A major task for a PV system designer is to choose optimum technology and design the PV system to maximize the performance ratio (PR). For instance, up to 10% shade in a PV system may reduce the power output to 50%. Therefore, a major task in this area is to optimize system design in commercial and domestic setting. Our work includes using state-of-the-art softwares incorporating practical experience from over 800 kWp of solar installation at LUMS.

There is an increasing emphasis towards Green and Energy Efficient Buildings in recent years. According to the International Energy Agency, urban buildings consume more than 50 percent of the total consumed power. Therefore the emphasis of this research is to investigate efficient hybrid as well as LVDC only building level power architecture which can reduce local power losses significantly. This will allow efficient utilization of power and will in turn a) reduce consumer’s electricity bill and b) reduce the increasing burden on national grid due to urbanization. The surplus grid power (as a result of direct savings) can then be provided to industry as well as rural electrification which would contribute to the country’s GDP.

The performance of Lithium-based batteries in mobile phones is highly dependent on their usage profiles, among other factors such as aging, operating temperature, and internal defects. Since many applications and processes draw power from phone batteries in varied patterns, the usage patterns affect the life and performance of phones. This study will be collecting and evaluating battery discharge profiles under active phone operation to estimate the effects on remaining charge and the cycle life of phone batteries.