Dhaka, Mar 7 (UNB) - Prime Minister’s Energy Advisor Dr Tawfiq-e-Elahi Chowdhury has urged the young scientists to intensify their efforts to scale up the renewable energy technology to cope up with the local demands.

“You have laid more emphasis on development of the technology to serve the country”, he told the local engineers and scientists at the 7th International Conference on Development in the Renewable Energy Technology (ICDRET’24) in the city’s United International University (UIU) that began on Thursday.

He also urged the organisations and companies working in the renewable energy sector to integrate their effort with the clean energy initiative.

“Some of the clean energies like nuclear power are more environmentally-friendly than renewable energy”, he said.

He said the country has 1.2 million diesel-run irrigation pumps.

If these pumps are converted into solar-run ones, and their additional power is given to the grid, it will save huge amounts of foreign currencies in fuel import, he said.

The conference is organized by the Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering and the Centre for Energy Research of UIU.

With Prof. Dr. Md. Abul Kashem Mia, Vice-Chancellor of UIU in the chair, the event was address by Prof. Dr. M. Rezwan Khan, Organizing Chair, ICDRET'24 and Executive Director, Institute for Advanced Research (IAR), UIU, Prof. Dr. Hasan Sarwar, Dean, School of Science andEngineering, UIU and Shahriar Ahmed Chowdhury, Organizing Co-Chair, ICDRET'24 and Director, CER.

The ICDRET conference has been supported through partnerships from globally renowned institutes in renewable energy that include Oldenburg University, Germany, Kathmandu University, Nepal, Centre for Energy and Global Environment, Virginia Tech, USA, Micro Energy, Germany, TERI, India, BERG and OREL from USA, Seris and National University of Singapore, Singapore. 

IEEE, the largest professional body in the world has maintained its technical co-sponsorship as it had done for the previous conferences.

Speakers at the conference discussed in detail how the development of renewable energy would be economically beneficial in meeting the challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

This year the ICDRET has received research papers from different countries e. g. Bangladesh, Canada, Turkey, Philippines, Nepal, and Bhutan.

This year's conference includes five keynote speeches and one invited talk sessions. In these three days, the conference continues with different technical sessions on scientific research of renewable energy technology.

Faculty members, officials, academicians, energy experts, researchers and other distinguished guests from various universities and institutions from home and abroad were present in the inaugural ceremony.