Author: Samuel Carrara

Deliverable 1.2 and periodic report completed

Deliverable 1.2 and periodic report completed

Finally in the past days I completed the last steps of the reporting activity which is required at the end of the first year of the project, i.e. Deliverable 1.2 and the periodic report. D1.2 is titled “Interactions and joint applications between the WITCH and the SWITCH models”. As I wrote in more than one post in the Research section (for instance here), the original objective of Work Package 1 was the modeling improvement of WITCH, concerning the system integration…

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LEAP – Rome

LEAP – Rome

Last Friday I went to Rome, where I participated in the LEAPin event organized at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. What is LEAP? Since I am lazy, and above all I would not like to be inaccurate, I report what was written on the presentation document 🙂 (I also link to the official website) “LEAP Summit is an international conference which gathers every year thousands of international students, young professionals and young entrepreneurs who are leaders in their communities. It…

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Deliverable 1.1 completed

Deliverable 1.1 completed

In the past days I finally completed Deliverable 1.1 which describes the new modeling of system integration, storage, and grid in the WITCH model. As you know, this represented the main research work that I conducted during my American year (in collaboration with Simone and Marco). Some weeks ago I had already written a post about this activity, so I will not spend any further words about this: in this page I simply report the deliverable, that you can find…

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Renewable Energy Prospects for the European Union – IRENA

Renewable Energy Prospects for the European Union – IRENA

Report launched today outlines how increasing share of renewables to 34% can boost economy, and help meet emission reductions goals. Source: EU Doubling Renewables by 2030 Positive for Economy, Key to Emission Reductions – IRENA The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) has recently published a report titled “Renewable Energy Prospects for the European Union”. This is literally one of the tasks of my MERCURY project, so I will read it very carefully. In the meantime, the page that I linked to…

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IAERE – Turin

IAERE – Turin

In the past days I took part in the annual conference of the Italian Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (IAERE), which was organized by the Department of Economics and Statistics of the University of Turin. This is a conference that I always attend: since its first edition in Ferrara in 2013, I basically missed only the 2017 edition in Rome… but only because I was in the United States! As I anticipated in the last but one post of…

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More policy attention is needed for renewable heat – IEA

More policy attention is needed for renewable heat – IEA

Heat remains the sleeping giant of energy policy despite massive potential for energy savings and emissions reductions Source: IEA: More policy attention is needed for renewable heat As you know, my project is focused on the power sector, which is the main responsible for carbon dioxide emissions within the overall energy sector. However, one should keep in mind that there are other sectors – especially transport and heat – which not only are characterized by high levels of energy consumption…

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System integration, storage, and grid in WITCH – Deliverable 1.1

System integration, storage, and grid in WITCH – Deliverable 1.1

The improvement of the modeling of system integration, storage, and grid in the WITCH model has been the main topic of the first year of the MERCURY project. The part regarding the system integration was developed in the first half of the year and was discussed in the seminar that I gave at FEEM in June. Storage and grid, instead, were developed in the second half of the year and were described in the final talk that I held at…

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Solar PV learning in Integrated Assessment Models – Second submission

Solar PV learning in Integrated Assessment Models – Second submission

Finally I can provide some updates on the core research activities that I carried out in the last couple of months. After the seminar that I gave in late November at UC Berkeley, apart from fixing some details about the system integration modeling in WITCH that were raised during the talk, I resumed the work about the exploration of pathways of solar PV learning in Integrated Assessment Models, that I had already described in many previous posts. After the analysis…

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Renewable power generation costs keep on decreasing – IRENA

Renewable power generation costs keep on decreasing – IRENA

New IRENA report finds all renewable technologies to be competitive by 2020. Source: Onshore Wind Power Now as Affordable as Any Other Source, Solar to Halve by 2020 I guess that the title and the caption perfectly summarize the concept! This is surely good news on the way towards the decarbonization of the power sector. The webpage also links to the full report which provides plenty of useful and interesting data.

FEEM internal seminar – II

FEEM internal seminar – II

Yesterday I took part in the first WITCH modeling meeting of my “new life” back to FEEM. As planned in my proposal, I gave a talk describing the activities that I carried out during my year at the University of California, Berkeley. My presentation was complemented by a talk by Simone, one of the two Master guys that I supervised in their dissertation in the past months and that has just started a three-month internship at FEEM. As predictable, my…

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