EnerGyan: A Portable Platform for Microgrid Education, Research, and Development

Energy management for microgrids is becoming an increasingly important topic for effective integration of diverse electricity sources and loads. Real-world deployment of microgrids requires hands-on experience in three key areas: education, research, and development. Most undergraduate and graduate classes on microgrids today take a theoretical learning approach, and the few that offer laboratory sessions often use analog based systems. In the microgrid research community, advanced control and optimization are often validated using numerical simulations or very specific and expensive lab hardware. This area of study also lacks a development platform for users to do rapid prototyping of microgrid solutions, making real-world implementation challenging. This paper introduces EnerGyan [1], a low-cost platform for education, research, and development for energy management in microgrids. It is a portable end-to-end platform which integrates energy infrastructure (energy sources, converters, storage, loads), communication and computing infrastructure (on-board computer, communication modules, user interfaces), and an energy management system, making it a programmable electricity-grid-in-a-box. EnerGyan also provides a software toolkit called EnerGyanToolKit, allowing users to develop and deploy energy applications. EnerGyan has been used for microgrid research, in teaching (workshops, lab course, hackathons), and as development tool (for managing a building microgrid).