IIT Delhi joins hands with CERC, Grid-India to establish Centre of Excellence on campus

Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IIT Delhi), has joined hands with the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC) and Grid Controller of India (Grid-India) to establish a Centre of Excellence (CoE) at the technology campus.

The CoE will be working in the area of power sector regulation, policies, power markets, and grid operations. The Centre of Excellence will be a knowledge hub from which the regulatory commissions, power system operators, utilities, and other organisations can invite expertise to meet job requirements, as per the official statement.

The agreement for establishing a new CoE was signed by Rangan Banerjee, director at IIT Delhi, Harpreet Singh Pruthi, secretary, CERC, and Paresh R Ranpara, director of human resources at Grid- India.

Jishnu Barua, chairman, CERC, said: “The CoE is expected to play a pivotal role in enhancing expertise of human resources for the sector and is likely to serve as a bridge between academia and the practitioners.”

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The new centre, to be established at the technology institute will reduce the gap between industry and academia and to find “indigenous” answers to address contemporary, emerging challenges in power system operation. “The CoE aims to create knowledge and enhance informed decision-making in the formulation of effective regulation through collaborative research and analysis. It would also act as a conduit for creating academic programs, resulting in good lawmaking and better regulatory techniques,” the institute added.

Samir Chandra Saxena, chairman and managing director, Grid-India, said: “Grid-India looks forward to this collaboration. This initiative marks a significant step towards advancing regulatory capacity in the power sector, fostering research, innovation, and informed policymaking and regulatory research for a more resilient and future-ready power sector ecosystem.”

Centre of Excellence at IIT Delhi: Main functions

The institute has listed several primary functions of the new CoE at the technology institute.

• To conduct academic, technical, and policy research and identify problems in the current energy transition period in India, including regulations, markets, and grid operations.
• Carry out system studies for making informed decisions about grid practices and associated regulations.
• Organise training, skill development and capacity building activities to train specialised workforce and existing manpower of the regulators, system operators, and other stakeholders.
• Also, the CoE will conduct short-term training in quantitative techniques, tariff models, modelling and forecasting techniques, electricity markets, and many more.
• It will also create a knowledge hub and information base to meet the current needs and future regulatory, operations, and strategic challenges.
• In addition, it will also act as a conduit for providing academic programmes at IIT Delhi.