In the introductory seminar I explained that my workplan for this year envisions two main research pathways that I would like to develop in parallel. Therefore, while mainly focusing on the system integration modeling in WITCH, in the past weeks I also began working on the SWITCH side.

In particular, I am contributing to an activity that is being developed by the SWITCH team and that has not been finalized yet (the first draft of the relevant paper has already been written, though). The activity – which by the way had already been mentioned in the introductory presentation – regards the study of the dynamics of decarbonization in the electricity sector in a set of countries for which SWITCH scenarios had been produced over the years. As I wrote in the cited presentation, the goal is to “study of the effects that different carbon price trajectories can have in defining technological deployment routes for the power sector”.

In this context I will not develop SWITCH for a specific region or country (such as the European Union or Italy, as had been mentioned in the previous posts), because this would not be of great value added (four countries are already considered in the work). Rather, I will explore the same issue with WITCH, trying to highlight the differences deriving from such a different modeling framework. The fact that China is both modeled explicitly in WITCH and is present in the portfolio of countries analyzed by SWITCH is a good suggestion to carry out an interesting comparison.