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Strong and huge interests on smart grid have increased extensively in recent years around the world. This scenario could be a promising reason for future research in this area. This next form of electricity grid will be able to manage various parts of power production from power plants to the customers. Smart grid has become a major challenge in developed nations in both research and utilization aspects. On the other side, application of smart grid in developing countries is still lagging behind as compared to the developed ones. However, most of developing nations are currently investigating potentials of some pilot projects or few research works. In this article, the applied activities in developing countries for smart grid are reviewed and categorized into two major groups: group of pioneer developing countries in smart grid and other developing countries are placed in another group. The findings demonstrate that a few countries such as China, India and Brazil have had proper planning and development in this technology. In some cases like China, the efforts are considered comparable with developed nations like U.S. Therefore, according to the development progress for smart grid in China, India and Brazil, a pattern of reference for other developing countries is suggested.

No abstract

In recent years, research about the application and optimization of PV panels has grown rapidly. Especially for stand-alone solar systems there have been some problems related to first stages of design and application. Finding the optimum slope of PV panels in order to maximize the absorbed solar radiation is considered as one of the major obstacles. Although in Malaysia there have been some research works about finding of optimal tilt angle, however, this research work aims to start investigation about slope of PV panels for three villages without electricity and prior research. The Liu and Jordan model is applied to find the monthly optimal tilt angle and fixed tilt angle for the application of solar energy in these rural locations. The results demonstrate that the optimal tilt angle in these locations is less than 5°.

In this study, wind energy potential in three different stations in Malaysia in period of 5 years is analyzed. Base on Weibull distribution parameters, the mean wind speed, wind power density and wind energy density is estimated for each defined location. Although there are many works about wind potential in Malaysia, however a few of them have been provided a comprehensive study about wind power in different places in Malaysia. According to the findings, the annual mean wind speeds indicates that the highest wind speed variation is about 2 m/s and is belonged to the Subang station and the highest wind speed is 3.5 m/s in in Kudat. It is also found that the maximum wind power densities among these three sites are 22 W/m2, 24 W/m2 and 22 W/m2 in Kudat station in January, February and September respectively. The results of the study show that as the second parameter for Weibull model, the highest wind energy density has been 190 kWh/m2 per year in Kudat and the lowest one has been about 60 kWh/m2 in Kuching.