Yesterday I finally completed the first draft of the CCS paper. As I anticipated in the last relevant post, I will likely finalize the article only after the end of the project: for the moment, this draft version is more than sufficient for Deliverable 2.1 and I have to focus on completing the modeling activity within January 15. The next step is the final task within WP2, focused on nuclear. It is known that this technology still represents a key…
In the past days I participated in the sixth annual conference of the Italian Society for Climate Sciences (SISC, Società Italiana per le Scienze del Clima) hosted by the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. As the name suggests, this conference has more a scientific focus on climate change than my research activity, but it is always good to remain as up-to-date as possible on the multi-dimensional aspects of climate change mitigation. For instance, a couple of keynote speeches regarded the…
Explore key findings from the IEA’s market report on renewable energy Source: Renewables 2018: Key Findings The International Energy Agency has recently published the “Renewables 2018” report, which discusses both the market status and the forecast from 2018 to 2023. The report is not for free, but the relevant webpage provides plenty of information, both as an overview and sorted by sectors (power, heat, and transport). The executive summary can also be downloaded. It is practically impossible to summarize the…
As anticipated two weeks ago, after running the CCS scenarios I focused on generating the relevant graphs in R, which I completed in the past days. I used the R script from the solar exercise, but some efforts were required to adapt it to this activity. Indeed I am not super expert with this software, and sometimes I had to ask help to more trained colleagues, but results are of great aesthetic quality. Plus, once you have written the script,…
Last Friday was a special day in the European research community, as the European Researchers’ Night (ERN) took place. The ERN is essentially one day – despite the name 🙂 – when, once per year, thousands of learning and interactive activities are organized all over Europe in order to involve the general public and increase its awareness of innovation and research activities. A lot of activities were organized in Milan as well: the biggest initiative, promoted by the main universities…
In the past days I finally completed the scenario runs concerning the CCS exercise that I have been carrying out in these weeks. Eventually I generated a set of 28 scenarios: as anticipated in one of the previous posts, there is a main matrix of climate targets (3.5°C, 3°C, 2.5°C, 2°C, and 1.5°C – all values refer to the temperature increase in 2100 with respect to the pre-industrial levels) coupled with different years when investing in CCS is triggered (2020,…
Speaking at the Oceans Partnership Summit during G7, IRENA Director-General Adnan Z. Amin underlined the potential of offshore renewable energy to meet energy demand, stimulate economic growth and generate employment – hallmarks of the global energy transformation. Source: IRENA points to offshore energy benefits for economies at G7 Offshore wind in the spotlight: is this technology going to be a game changer in the power generation sector in the next decades? For sure, so far renewable development has mostly focused…
A couple of months ago I dedicated a post to the completion of the very first draft version of the paper focused on the solar PV learning activity. I specified that I had shared the document with my co-authors and that, once received their feedback, I would aim at producing the first full version of the paper within end August. Well, this target has essentially been reached 🙂 In fact in the past days I finalized the document and, again,…
New IRENA brief highlights positive momentum for off-grid renewable energy, and its transformative impact as a key pillar of Sustainable Development Goal 7 Source: Off-grid Renewables are Growing, Bringing Socio-economic Benefits to Millions I had missed this interesting brief published by IRENA about one month ago! As discussed in many posts, one of the main topics within the MERCURY project is the analysis of the issues related to the penetration of variable renewable energies in the electricity grid. For this…
Repeating the experience that I had the past year, last week I took part in the “Meeting for friendship among peoples”, in Rimini (Emilia-Romagna, Italy). To remind you what this meeting is and the reasons why I decided to participate, I report the words that I used for describing the 2017 edition of the event: This meeting is a multi-event festival organized by Communion and Liberation, an Italian Catholic association, where prominent people from culture, academy, science, society, and politics…