The current difficulty in obtaining financial resources to acquire equipment for training personnel and the requirement of well-trained engineers in the industry looking toward sustainability, creates an opportunity to innovate in teaching tools, such as the proposed in this article, where a virtual world is projected, integrating the planning and design of a photovoltaic power plant (PV). The user can interact while immersed in the virtual scene as if the PV system were already installed, illustrating technical characteristics of selected equipment and its installation details, while the user is interacting with didactic activities focused on visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning. This paper summarizes an initiative within the teaching–learning context, which aims to show the advantages of using modern tools, such as virtual reality, to achieve teaching goals in a renewable energy course.

This study aims to develop and evaluate an Augmented Reality (AR) application to teach power electronics to beginners. For this purpose, two topics were presented: The first was the design of a series-connected Resistance–Inductor–Capacitor (RLC) circuit in AR, the space-state equations of which were analyzed in an interactive way, and its assembly in a virtual protoboard to analyze the voltage and currents as measured by an oscilloscope. The second presented topic in AR was about Bidirectional Direct Current (DC)–DC converters, known as Buck–Boost; the aim was to study their behavior when energy is exchanged between two systems, usually photovoltaic panels, electric vehicles, and storage systems. The attitudes of the students towards the AR application was significantly better than those towards traditional teaching. The measurements of the developed skills indicated better cognitive performance when using AR technology. The designed AR tool was used in an industry course to explore the students’ opinions, who provided valuable feedback.

This work proposes a real-time electricity bill for quantifying the energy used in domestic facilities in Mexico. This bill is a low-cost tool that takes advantage of the IoT technology for generating an easy reading real-time bill allowing the customers to constantly review and administrate their energy consumption. Using low-cost sensors and the electronic board Particle^® Photon, an energy meter is proposed. The presented prototype is extremely compact and satisfies safety measures to be used by anyone in a domestic installation. The measurement data is displayed and processed in real-time, and an appropriate algorithm determines the accumulated kWh. The energy consumed is displayed using an Html interface of easy interpretation for the customers, given recommendations about their consumption habits and some alarms in case of abnormal or high consumption. As a reinforcement measure for avoiding large consumption bills, the system is programmed to send messages to the user, remembering if the estimated consumption is large.