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 of Variable Renewable Energies in the electricity system, storage, grid, and electricity trade. SWITCH was initially intended to be just a reference for the work on WITCH. When I put my hands on SWITCH, however, I understood that a two-way collaboration between the two models would be more fruitful. Additionally, electricity trade was found to be not so necessary for the modeling work in WITCH. Therefore Deliverable 1.2, which was originally supposed to be dedicated to the electricty trade modeling in WITCH, was diverted to the joint applications of WITCH and SWITCH.

The ideal solution would have been to carry out a full integration of the two models leveraging the strengths and compensating the weaknesses of both models. I remind that SWITCH is a detailed electricity model which cannot capture the impacts of the different evolution patterns of this sector on the rest of the energy sector, the economy or climate, but on the other hand it is more able to capture specific details that are missing in Integrated Assessment Models, and in particular in WITCH. However, this would have gone beyond the objectives and the scope of the MERCURY project (in this regard, in D1.2 I just described the guidelines that should be followed to carry out such an integration, possibly for future research works).

Two more limited research activities were conducted, then: the dynamics of decarbonization and the validation of the new grid and storage modeling in WITCH through SWITCH. I do not spend more words about these topics as I described them in many posts, and in particular here.

Differently from D1.1, I cannot publish D1.2 for the moment because it contains some results from the paper developed at UC Berkeley which is still in the completion phase: I will upload it as soon as possible.

As the name suggests, the periodic report is the document which describes all the relevant aspects of the outgoing phase of the project, both from a technical and a financial point of view. It has been quite annoying to report everything (the research as well as the communication and outreach activities, the financial details, and so on), honestly! But now it is done and I can finally come back to the real modeling work: the next steps will be the finalization of the learning in solar PV activity and the paper on the new modeling of storage and grid in WITCH (of course D1.1 will be of great help)!