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…
As I had anticipated in my post on August 13, last week I took part in the “Meeting for friendship among peoples”, in Rimini. This meeting is a multi-event festival organized annually by Communion and Liberation, an Italian Catholic association, where prominent people from culture, academy, science, society, and politics are invited to give talks or participate in debates. Although not specifically related to my MERCURY project, I decided to attend the festival because I considered that the high level…
As I had anticipated in my previous posts, in the past days I took part in the 36th International Energy Workshop (IEW), which was held in College Park, Maryland, organized by the Joint Global Change Research Institute of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and University of Maryland (UMD). This is a lower-scale conference compared to the EAERE event, but being specifically focused on energy, it was not difficult at all for me to find very interesting presentations, often close to…
In the past days I attended the annual conference of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (EAERE), which this year was held in Athens, being organized by the International Centre for Research on the Environment and the Economy (ICRE8). The EAERE conference is one of the most important events in our research field and it was one of the main reasons why I organized my European break precisely in this period. Unsurprisingly, it was worth to be there…
Yesterday I finally gave a seminar at FEEM summarizing the work that I carried out in the first quarter of my MERCURY project in Berkeley. In addition to the pleasure of meeting again my colleagues, I found the discussion very useful because they provided me with valuable comments and suggestions. As anticipated in my previous posts, the main topics that I dealt with were: WP1: System integration in WITCH WP1: Interactions and joint applications between WITCH and SWITCH (dynamics of…
As I mentioned in my previous post, the past weeks have been dedicated to the study of the SWITCH model, in addition to a deep review of the state of the art of the power system modeling in Integrated Assessment Models. This allowed me to identify both the possible solutions to improve the WITCH model offered by the IAM literature and the potential routes to implement an integration between WITCH and SWITCH. Hence, I was able to define more in…
This week I finally had the pleasure to meet my UC Berkeley Supervisor, Prof. Daniel Kammen, in person. We had a kick-off meeting aimed at framing the work that I will be doing during my visiting period here in Berkeley. Naturally, the choice of the host institution for the outgoing phase of my fellowship has not been made randomly: the synergy with the Renewable & Appropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL) directed by Prof. Kammen is strategic, in fact, because this research…