Cooling demand in integrated assessment models: a methodological review

The paper systematically reviews and compares 88 scenarios of energy demand in commercial and residential buildings that include the additional energy use or savings induced by thermal adaptation in heating and cooling needs at global level. The resulting studies are grouped in a novel classification that makes it possible to systematically understand why the energy projections of integrated assessment models vary depending on how changes in climatic conditions and the associated adaptation needs are modeled. Projections underestimate the energy demand of the building sector when it is driven only by income, population, unchanging climatic conditions and their associated adaptation needs. Across the studies reviewed, already by 2050 climate change will induce a median 30% (90%) percentage variation of a building's energy demand for cooling and a median -8% (-24%) percentage variation for heating, leading to a 2% (13%) increase when cooling and heating are combined, under the Representative Concentration Pathway 1.9 (8.5). The results underscore that models lacking extensive margin adjustments, and models that focus on residential demand, highly underestimate the additional cooling needs of the building sector. Topics that deserve further investigation regard improving the characterization of adopting energy-using goods that provide thermal adaptation services and better articulating the heterogeneous needs across sectors

Tropical analogues of a Dempe-Franke bilevel optimization problem

We consider the tropical analogues of a particular bilevel optimization problem studied by Dempe and Franke and suggest some methods of solving these new tropical bilevel optimization problems. In particular, it is found that the algorithm developed by Dempe and Franke can be formulated and its validity can be proved in a more general setting, which includes the tropical bilevel optimization problems in question. We also show how the feasible set can be decomposed into a finite number of tropical polyhedra, to which the tropical linear programming solvers can be applied.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figur

Les III Jornades de Formació Professional

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Power systems' performance under high renewables' penetration rates: a natural experiment due to the COVID-19 demand shock

COVID-19 lockdowns make it possible to investigate the extent to which an unprecedented increase in renewables' penetration may have brought unexpected limitations and vulnerabilities of current power systems to the surface. We empirically investigate how power systems in five European countries have dealt with this unexpected shock, drastically changing electricity load, the scheduling of dispatchable generation technologies, electricity day-ahead wholesale prices, and balancing costs. We find that low-cost dispatchable generation from hydro and nuclear sources has fulfilled most of the net-load even during peak hours, replacing more costly fossil-based generation. In Germany, the UK, and Spain coal power plants stood idle, while gas-fired generation has responded in heterogeneous ways across power systems. Falling operational costs of generators producing at the margin and lower demand, both induced by COVID-19 lockdowns, have significantly decreased wholesale prices. Balancing and other ancillary services' markets have provided the flexibility required to respond to the exceptional market conditions faced by the grid. Balancing costs for flexibility services have increased heterogeneously across countries, while ancillary markets' costs, measured only in the case of Italy, have increased substantially. Results provide valuable evidence on current systems' dynamics during high renewables' shares and increased demand volatility. New insights into the market changes countries will be facing in the transition towards a clean, secure, and affordable power system are offered

Low frequency stability of the mixed discretization of the MFIE

Recently, a novel discretization for the magnetic field integral equation (MFIE) was presented. This discretization involves both Rao-Wilton-Glisson (RWG) basis functions and Buffa-Christiansen (BC) basis functions and is dubbed `mixed'. The scheme conforms to the functional spaces most natural to electromagnetics and thus can be expected to yield more accurate results. In this contribution, this intuition is corroborated by an analysis of the low frequency behavior of the classical and mixed discretizations of the MFIE. It is proved that the mixed discretization of the MFIE yields accurate results at very low frequencies whereas the classical discretization breaks down, as was already discussed extensively in literature