Final seminar at UC Berkeley
As anticipated in the last Research post, yesterday I gave my final seminar at RAEL, in which I provided my colleagues with an overview of the work that I carried out during my American year. Gosh! Eight and a half months have passed since I held my introductory seminar: it seems yesterday, but it was March 15!
By the way, I would have liked to have a bit more time to finalize some activities, but this was the last RAEL lunch seminar of the Fall Semester: final examinations are approaching and this is the last week of classes.
In my seminar I focused on the activities of Work Package 1, therefore I talked about i) the improvements to the WITCH model, and ii) the interactions between WITCH and SWITCH.
Concerning the first part, I described the new modeling of i) system integration of Variable Renewable Energies, ii) storage, and iii) grid that I developed in cooperation with Marco and Simone.
Concerning the second part, I discussed i) the comparison and validation of storage and grid modeling in WITCH through SWITCH, and ii) the dynamics of decarbonization issue. I also reminded the scheme for the soft-linkage of WITCH and SWITCH for the European Union that I had already mentioned in my first seminar. This is an activity that I wish I had done during this year, but eventually it was really impossible in terms of time. It is a valuable topic, though, that I will try to pursue in future projects.
I did not talk about the activities of the other work packages, and in particular about the PV learning exercise, as I wanted to keep focused on the main work of this year, due to time and clarity reasons.
You can find the presentation here.
As I mentioned in the previous post, the dynamics of decarbonization activity will continue in the next weeks: scenarios have been run and the main results have been derived, but a number of issues regarding the fundamentals of WITCH and SWITCH still have to be investigated. I will do that in cooperation with JP, also once come back to Italy, if needed.
In parallel, I will have to resume the PV learning activity that I mentioned above: after the analysis of the first submission results and the definition of the new protocol that I progressively performed over the past months, it is now time for the second submission.