Scientific publications
Cassetti, G., Elia, A., Gargiulo, M., & Chiodi, A. (2023). Reinforcing the Paris Agreement: ambitious scenarios for the decarbonisation of the Central Asian and Caspian region. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Transition, 3, 100048.
For its abundant fossil resources, the Central Asia and Caspian region plays a strategic role in the energy security of major markets, such as Europe and China. However, this dependence on export, added to a firm reliance on fossil fuels for internal consumption, represents a significant challenge for the decarbonisation of the region.
Frilingou, N., Xexakis, G., Koasidis, K., Nikas, A., Campagnolo, L., Delpiazzo, E., Chiodi, A., Gargiulo, M., McWilliams, B., Koutsellis, T., & Doukas, H. (2023). Navigating through an energy crisis: Challenges and progress towards electricity decarbonisation, reliability, and affordability in Italy. Energy Research & Social Science, 96, 102934.
Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine and amidst COVID-19 recovery efforts, the energy crisis has put enormous pressure to policymakers to balance climate action, sustainable development, and management of the impacts of fuel supply disruptions and price shocks. Policy and market responses, such as liquefied natural gas infrastructure investments and use of every available fossil-fuel lever to make up for Russian gas supply cuts, are feared to trigger new lock-ins, jeopardising decarbonisation.
Moreno, J., Van de Ven, D.-J., Sampedro, J., Gambhir, A., Woods, J., & Gonzalez-Eguino, M. (2023). Assessing synergies and trade-offs of diverging Paris-compliant mitigation strategies with long-term SDG objectives. Global Environmental Change, 78, 102624.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement are the two transformative agendas, which set the benchmarks for nations to address urgent social, economic and environmental challenges. Aside from setting long-term goals, the pathways followed by nations will involve a series of synergies and trade-offs both between and within these agendas.
Perdana, S., Xexakis, G., Koasidis, K., Vielle, M., Nikas, A., Doukas, H., Gambhir, A., Anger-Kraavi, A., May, E., McWilliams, B., & Boitier, B. (2023). Expert perceptions of game-changing innovations towards net zero. Energy Strategy Reviews, 45, 101022.
Current technological improvements are yet to put the world on track to net-zero, which will require the uptake of transformative low-carbon innovations to supplement mitigation efforts. However, the role of such innovations is not yet fully understood; some of these ‘miracles’ are considered indispensable to Paris Agreement-compliant mitigation, but their limitations, availability, and potential remain a source of debate.
Perdana, S., Vielle, M., & Schenckery, M. (2022). European Economic impacts of cutting energy imports from Russia: A computable general equilibrium analysis. Energy Strategy Reviews, 44, 101006.
The recent economic sanctions against Russia can jeopardise the sustainability of the European Union’s (EU) energy supply. Despite the EU’s strong commitment to stringent abatement targets, fossil fuels still play a significant role in the EU energy policy. Furthermore, high dependency on Russian energy supplies underlines the vulnerability of the EU energy security.
Babonneau, F., Haurie, A., & Vielle, M. (2023). Reaching Paris Agreement Goal through Carbon Dioxide Removal Development: a Compact OR Model. Operations Research Letters, 51(1), 33-39.
A compact operations research (OR) model is proposed to analyse the prospects of meeting the Paris Agreement targets when direct air capture technologies can be used or not. The main features of the OR model are (i) the representation of the economy and energy use with a nested constant elasticity of substitution production function; (ii) the representation of climate policy through the use of a safety emissions budget concept; and (iii) the representation of an international emissions trading scheme for the implementation of climate policy.
Jochem, P., Gnann, T., Anderson, J. E., Bergfeld, M., & Plötz, P. (2022). Where should electric vehicle users without home charging charge their vehicle?. Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, 113, 103526.
An often-heard argument against using plug-in electric vehicles (PEV) by urban dwellers is the missing curbside charging option. Some users are even expecting these charging stations to deliver cheap electricity. However, from an economic perspective several arguments speak against this hope and, furthermore, the need of curbside chargers is often exaggerated in literature. Consequently, we shed more light into these two hypotheses (H1. curbside charging is very costly and H2.
Sognnaes, I. (2022). What can we learn from probabilistic feasibility assessments?. Joule, 6(11), 2450-2452.
In a new paper in Nature Energy, Odenweller et al. use uncertainty analysis to derive a probabilistic feasibility space for green hydrogen supply. Their analysis shows that even if electrolysis capacity grows as fast as wind and solar power have done, green hydrogen supply will remain scarce in the short term and uncertain in the long term.
Cassetti, G., Boitier, B., Elia, A., Le Mouël, P., Gargiulo, M., Zagamé, P., Nikas, A., Koasidis, K., Doukas, H., & Chiodi, A. (2023). The interplay among COVID-19 economic recovery, behavioural changes, and the European Green Deal: An energy-economic modelling perspective. Energy, 263, 125798.
In the EU, COVID-19 and associated policy responses led to economy-wide disruptions and shifts in services demand, with considerable energy-system implications. The European Commission's response paved the way towards enhancing climate ambition through the European Green Deal. Understanding the interactions among environmental, social, and economic dimensions in climate action post-COVID thus emerged as a key challenge.
Koasidis, K., Nikas, A., Van de Ven, D.J., Xexakis, G., Forouli, A., Mittal, S., Gambhir, A., Koutsellis, T., & Doukas, H. (2022). Towards a green recovery in the EU: Aligning further emissions reductions with short- and long-term energy-sector employment gains. Energy Policy, 171, 113301.
To tackle the negative socioeconomic implications of the COVID-19 pandemic, the European Union (EU) introduced the Recovery and Resilience Facility, a financial instrument to help Member States recover, on the basis that minimum 37% of the recovery funds flow towards the green transition.