Dr. Mohamed DarwishDr Mohamed Darwish is a Chartered Engineer and a Senior Lecturer in Power Electronics and Renewable Energy Systems at Brunel University – UK.  He has over 35 years’ experience of research and teaching in the area of Power Electronics and Renewable Energy Systems.  His research interests include solar inverters, active power filters, uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems, power quality and renewable energy systems.Dr Darwish has supervised more than 35 PhD research students and over 150 MSc students.  He had published over 120 journal and conference papers within the area of Power Electronics and Renewable Energy Systems.  Dr Darwish was the Principle Investigator for an EPSRC grant (Programmable Tuned Filters for Retrofit Applications), for a TCS grant (Power Quality Solutions) and recently a £1m Innovate UK grant for revolutionary low-loss cable.  He has also delivered several short courses in renewable energy systems for several companies in the Middle East, Europe and USA.       

ABSTRACT:
Renewable energies are sources of clean, inexhaustible and increasingly competitive energy. Their costs are falling and at a sustainable rate, whereas the general cost trend for fossil fuels is in the opposite direction.  Since 2014, most Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries have scaled-up their interest in renewable sources of energy, especially in wind and solar power generation.  However, the latest 2016 figure from International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) shows that the renewable power production, including hydro, in MENA countries did not exceed 6% of total generation capacity. This is in comparison with 25% in average across the world.

In this talk, Dr Darwish will cover types of the renewable energy sources in general and then he will focus on the potential for wide-scale deployment of renewable energy technologies in the MENA region.  Iraq will be covered as a case study in the presentation.