Running the scenarios for the nuclear exercise did not take too much time: after all, as described in the relevant post, they were only five and setting up the modeling conditions did not require any special work . After the work on solar PV and CCS, I have also become fairly efficient in using the R language, that I adopt for producing graphs: the “initial cost” has been quite high, but the quality of the charts is surely worth the…
Yesterday I participated in a workshop organized by the Millennials Ambassadors Forum (MAF) in Turin. MAF is a think-tank where the so-called Ambassadors, i.e. prominent personalities from the social, political, and economic world, provide mentorship to the new generations under the inspiration of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Naturally the event was not strictly related to the MERCURY project, but it was surely within my multi-dimensional training objectives, especially in the broader perspective of understanding the world where…
As anticipated in the last post concerning my research, in the last weeks I focused on conceiving the nuclear exercise. First of all, I carried out an extensive literature review concerning the present nuclear landscape and the prospects in the different countries. The nuclear scenario is rather polarized between OECD and non-OECD countries. The former feature the most numerous fleets, but most reactors are approaching the end of their operational life and governmental policies are in most cases against further…
Last Wednesday I participated in a seminar organized by the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC, Centro Euro-Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici) in Venice. The seminar was titled “A EU ‘Paris consistent’ road transport policy: is it possible and what would it take?” and was held by Jørgen Henningsen, senior adviser on energy and climate change of the European Policy Centre, and, among others, former director of the DG Environment of the European Commission. Indeed I did not simply attend the…
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…
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,…
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,…