[djchris]

SINGAPORE: How can you generate electricity for your own use or track your power usage at home?

A group of university students has developed just the right gadgets to do that.

And they are hoping to attract government funding to develop them further in order to beef up the clean energy industry which is set to become a new economic pillar for Singapore.

A bright idea led two Nanyang Technological University (NTU) students to develop a system which will generate electricity in homes.

They took about nine months to work on their final-year project, which relies on solar panels to produce electricity.

One of the students, Tan Kuan Khoon, said: "The current system gathers energy, sunlight, converts it into electricity, sends it down to the battery for storage and the excess energy can be used to power up your typical household appliances like vacuum cleaners and computers. If there's any more excess, you can actually propose to sell it back to the grid."

Currently, such a system is not available in Singapore.

The prototype, if commercialised, will bring great savings to the public.

For example, one three-room flat consumes about 1,000 watts of electricity, which can power about 15 ceiling fans. But with this system, it can reduce a family's monthly household electricity bill by half.

And that is where another project, which allows consumers to keep track of their electricity and water consumption at the click of a mouse, comes in handy.

With this system, the digital data from each household will be transmitted to the power company.

Consumers can then find out, on a daily or even hourly basis, how much energy they have used and how much it costs.

Liang Yee Chet, another NTU student who worked on the project, said: "It's very practical and interesting... the metering and billing system can tell us how much power we have used each day."

Dr Lalit Goel, Head, Division of Power Engineering, NTU, said: "Energy is one of the key areas that have been identified by the Singapore government as well as the Economic Development Board and the A*Star as one of the key areas that will shape the future of Singaporeans.

"The current electricity needs which rely on oil, gas and coal in many parts of the world will not be met in the future because these reserves will slowly run out. So this is one of the main reasons why we think we should work on this very important area of energy."

The university has submitted eight of such projects to A*Star in hope of receiving some grants.



- CNA/so