The IEEE International Future Energy Challenge (IFEC) 2022 was held at the Center for Ultra-Wide-Area Resilient Electric Energy Transmission Networks (CURENT) in the Min H. Kao Building on July 27-29. IFEC is the largest international student competition in power electronics for innovation, conservation, and effective use of electrical energy. Eight teams with more than 50 participants from around the world attended the final competition, demonstrating 1kW power delivery from their solar microgrid inverters to the Hardware Testbed (HTB), a power electronic converter-based Grid Emulator at CURENT.

Professors Kevin Bai, Daniel Costinett, and Helen Cui of the Min H. Kao Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) served as the General Chair, General Co-Chair, and Publicity Chair for the event. This year, IFEC leveraged the CURENT HTB facility to provide opportunities for undergraduate students to gain crucial technical skills in power electronics through hands-on experiments. The IFEC committee members would like to acknowledge the support from EECS, CURENT, and the HTB supporting team Jingxin Wang and Natt Praisuwanna, as well as graduate student volunteers Xin Xia, Yang Huang, Yue Sun, and Niu Jia for their contributions and efforts.

Awards were presented to the winning student teams:

• Grand Prize ($10,000): Utah State University
• Best Innovation Award ($5,000): University of Belgrade
• Best Engineering Design Award ($3,000): Reutlingen University
• Best presentation Award ($1,000): Leibniz University, Hannover
• Best Team Work Award ($500): University of Maryland
• Best Educational Impact Award($500): University of Connecticut
• Best Participant Award ($300): University of Moratuwa