Categoria: Research

Meeting 2018 – Rimini

Meeting 2018 – Rimini

Repeating the experience that I had the past year, last week I took part in the “Meeting for friendship among peoples”, in Rimini. 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 are invited…

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CCS scenarios

CCS scenarios

About one month ago, in this post I introduced the new activity that I started before the summer break, aimed at investigating the implications of a delayed deployment of CCS technologies on the energy sector and the whole economy. In these days I am enjoying my summer break in the Lombardy  mountains… but the “work virus” is always present in me! So I thought that it could be useful to exploit at least part of my spare time running some scenarios….

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Renewables finally completed!

Renewables finally completed!

I guess the title does not need any major explanations! As I discussed in the previous posts (in particular, here and here), the implementation of the new modules regarding the system integration of renewables, storage, and grid in the master version of the WITCH model showed some issues, which took a lot of time to be solved. Also thanks to the great help from my colleagues Laurent and Johannes, the main issues have finally been solved and the new modeling…

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CCS futures

CCS futures

After sharing with my colleagues the first version of the paper about  learning in solar PV (see the last post), in the past days I started working on another front of Work Package 2. I remind that this WP regards the prospects of low-carbon technologies, focusing not so much on pure technical aspects, but on general policy issues impacting on the diffusion of such technologies. The solar PV learning activity covers the investigation on renewables. Naturally renewables are not only…

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Solar PV learning in Integrated Assessment Models – first paper draft

Solar PV learning in Integrated Assessment Models – first paper draft

In the last post on this topic, which dates back to March 31, I discussed the end of the modeling work and my ambition to draft the first version of the paper within Spring. Indeed, due to the issues that I had with the renewables (which by the way are still pending… but completion is hopefully not far), I managed to complete this task only in the past days. Thus I am a bit behind schedule, but what counts is…

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IEW – Gothenburg

IEW – Gothenburg

This week I participated in the 37th International Energy Workshop (IEW), organized by the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. As I specified in the post dedicated to the 2017 edition, the IEW is focused on energy and it is essentially the most relevant conference for my work over the year. Last year I gave a presentation on the solar PV learning activity, while this year I wanted to present my work on system integration, storage, and grid. Indeed…

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EMEE – Milan

EMEE – Milan

In the past two days, FEEM hosted the 11th International Workshop on Empirical Methods in Energy Economics (EMEE). Although empirical methods are not tools that I normally use in my research, I thought that it could be a good occasion to attend interesting presentations, considering that this workshop has a sound international reputation. Presentations were indeed interesting and insightful. Of course I could not fully get the details of the methodologies, but the key messages and conclusions were clear also…

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WITCH modeling meeting – Renewables

WITCH modeling meeting – Renewables

As I discussed in a couple of posts in the past weeks (here and here), I am still working on refining the new modeling of Variable Renewable Energies in WITCH in order to make the MERCURY version of the model fully compatible with the master version. Yesterday we had the WITCH internal modeling meeting, where I presented the progress of my work: you can find the presentation here. Still a lot of work to do, but step by step…

Renewables never die…

Renewables never die…

Yes, I have still been working on the implementation of the renewable module in the master version of the WITCH model… Technical issues are numerous and an optimal code configuration is yet to be found. One of the most problematic aspects is that the convergence is very slow, so sometimes up to an hour, or even more, is needed just to check the impact of one small change. But honestly, the most problematic aspect is that I really hate this…

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System integration, storage, and grid in WITCH – Additional work needed

System integration, storage, and grid in WITCH – Additional work needed

Talking about Deliverable D1.1, I had mentioned the work needed to align the WITCH version developed for the MERCURY project by Marco, Simone and me with the official version of the code (that we normally call “master”). Simone took care of this activity, which seemed to have been completed. However, in the last weeks some technical issues arose. The problems are not related to the quality of the new modules and their integration in the master version of the model…

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