Fourth place and Best Defence award in EPSSCom 2021

A team of Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) Electrical and Electronic Engineering students from Lee Kong Chian Faculty of Engineering and Science (LKS FES), namely Chong Yue Jiet, Eric Chieng You Liang, Liow Shii Yin, Tan Hui Li and Wong Yan Bin, won fourth place in the Electrical Power System Competition 2021 (EPSSCom 2021), organised by IEEE PES (Power and Energy Society) Malaysia Chapter and CIRED Malaysia from 9 August to 18 December 2021 via Microsoft Teams.

EPSSCom 2021 provided a platform for undergraduate electrical engineering students to present their simulation works, as well as to share experiences and ideas in power and energy engineering with industrial experts and academic scholars. The competition required participants to find solutions for power systems and design large scale solar plants to promote the development of renewable energy in Malaysia.

Team advisor and LKC FES academic Assoc Prof Ir Dr Wong Jian Hui commented, “I am impressed that our students are very dedicated, resilient and diligent. I strongly believe that these exemplary attitudes can be a role model to others.  Through this competition, they have demonstrated competency in applying the knowledge they have learnt to complete the given real industrial case study, and they have good time management despite the submission of various coursework and final assessment preparation happening at the same time. Once again, I would like to congratulate our students and we are proud of them.”

The team enthused, “We are grateful and happy for winning these awards as teamwork and mutual accountability are very crucial in achieving our goals, especially during this pandemic. Ir Dr Wong introduced us to this competition. We got interested and believed that this competition can prompt us to explore real-world power system problems and use our knowledge to solve them. We have regular meetings with our groupmates as well as supervisor every week. Our supervisors provided us with many precious suggestions, technical supports, and experiences to improve our work and report quality. Our determination and cooperation among groupmates provided us mental support so that we were committed to the competition.”

They added, “UTAR has experienced and knowledgeable lecturers who provided us useful information that can be utilised in our project. For example, we have learnt to use the simulation software (ETAP) through some courses (Power Protection and Switchgear, Electrical Design and Utilisation). Besides that, we also learnt the power flow analysis and short circuit analysis through the Power Systems. For the large-scale solar plant design part, we had utilised the knowledge about PV plants we learned from the course Renewable Energy, which helped us make a good arrangement of PV Modules and the right choice of Inverter Size. We would like to thank Ir Dr Wong Jian Hui and Dr Chua Kein Huat for their comments and supervision throughout the competition, as well as for their patience and passion in guiding us throughout the competition.” The team received RM250 cash prize for fourth place and RM200 cash prize for the Best Defence Award.

In the competition, the team designed a large-scale solar farm that can be connected to the National Grid. The project also enabled the team to familiarise themselves with the bidding process, including helping the team to understand SPPA and Grid Code requirements.

The team explained, “Our project relates to Sustainable Development Goal 7: Affordable and Clean Energy, which focuses to ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all. Despite the increased usage of renewable energy in the electricity sector, millions are still left without electricity, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. With the knowledge of Large Scale Solar Farm design, we can effectively design a solar farm that can harvest more energy to get rid of electricity outages, especially for rural areas. Moreover, we believe that it provides various benefits such as mitigating the global warming and reducing the dependency on fossil fuels for energy generation.”

Their project also highlighted the global warming issue which caused greenhouse gasses released from the combustion of fossil fuels to generate electricity. The use of renewable energy can generate electricity without releasing any pollutants.