As I had detailed in my post about one month ago, the last part of my second European travel has been dedicated to the 15th European Conference of the International Association for Energy Economics (IAEE), held in Vienna from September 3 to 6 and titled “Heading towards sustainable energy systems: evolution or revolution?” As a scale, this conference can be compared to the EAERE event, so it was quite huge. Being focused on energy, as a content it is more similar to the IEW, though, even if normally the IEW has a broader scope and often features a bit more technical presentations.

In this conference, I found the plenary and the poster sessions really interesting, while I must say that I was not enthusiastic about some parallel sessions that I attended. This is something that can happen, however: in huge conferences like this, there are a number of potentially interesting sessions and you have to choose. Sometimes you are lucky, sometimes it is less the case. I specify that oftentimes it is not about the quality of the presenation per se, but simply the presentation describes a work or adopts a methodology which are different from what you expected. In any case, overall I was satisfied with the conference: it was useful to stay up-to-date about the main research topics in Energy Economics. I also got in touch with a couple of researchers which whom I might interact for future activities.

During the conference I gave my presentation on the solar PV learning activity, which I already did at the IEW. Indeed, since then the presentation has essentially remained unchanged, as I could not focus on this activity in the last couple of months. For sure I will extensively work on it during the fall, though.

You can find the presentation here.

The conference was followed by a workshop organized in the context of the European H2020 SET-Nav project and titled “Aggregating load profiles from the power sector models towards use in large-scale energy-system and integrated assessment models”. The subject of the workshop was perfectly in line with the MERCURY project, and in particular with its Work Package 1, dedicated to power system modeling, so I decided to stay one more day in Vienna in order to attend it. The workshop turned out to be very useful for my research, so it was worth it!