In the past year, several crises have emerged and posed important challenges to the European Union. The impact of energy shortages is aggravated by problems in the supply of raw materials, manufactured components and, finally, by the war in Ukraine.
In this podcast, FSR Director, Jean-Michel Glachant, and CEO of the European Climate Foundation, Laurence Tubiana, share their thoughts with Nicolò Rossetto (FSR) after the launching of the joint policy manifesto, “Between crises and decarbonization: realigning EU climate and energy policy for a new State of the World”.
Glachant and Tubiana are crystal-clear that energy security and climate security are not two contrasting goals, but the new “State of the World”. In this new world, EU has to rethink its strategy and decision making to prepare a systemic change involving all its citizens beyond traditional stakeholders.

➡️ To watch the recording of the launching event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkrSpu3LXW8

➡️ To read the policy manifesto https://fsr.eui.eu/publications/?handle=1814/74737

On 15 December 2021 at 6th AIEE Energy Symposium, the FSR Director, Jean-Michel Glachant gave a presentation from the title “Towards flexible energy systems on the demand side: Markets & Regulation”.
Professor Glachant has been elected President-elect 2022 of the International Association for Energy Economics (IAEE) to start from January 2022.
To learn more about IAEE: https://www.iaee.org/

Following the plenary session on “The future energy mix” of the 1st IAEE Online Conference, Piero Carlo dos Reis interviewed Prof. Keigo Akimoto (RITE), who chaired this session, in order to ask him about his main reflections. Prof. Keigo explained that the future energy mix will be largely driven by a wide range of technological innovations in both energy supply side and demand side aiming at deep GHG emissions reduction (e.g., renewables, batteries, negative emissions technologies …). However, Prof. Keigo believes that it will be challenging to coordinate deep emissions reduction across several countries at different economic growth stages, some prioritising cheap energy costs for their energy-intensive industries, others implementing carbon border adjustment mechanisms (CBAMs). Ultimately, if we wish to achieve deep emissions reduction worldwide, we have to make an effort to have both a good coordination among countries and clean technological innovations leading to cheap energy costs.

In the slipstream of the concluding plenary session on the future of the energy system, Tim Schittekatte interviews Christophe Bonnery who chaired the session to ask him about his main reflections. Bonnery explains that in order to meet our netzero goals we can expect more government intervention in supporting the investment in new power generation. Also, Bonnery emphasizes that not only increased deployment of renewables are key in the green transition but that there is also an important role for the distribution system operator to act as an enabler of a greener, more decentralized power system.

Nuclear energy is a low-carbon energy source that could play an important role in the decarbonisation of the energy sector and provide additional benefits in terms of local employment and security of supply. However, the development of nuclear energy, at least in Western countries, has been limited in the past few years. The industry is ready to do its part but invites governments to make clear decisions and provide a level playing field where nuclear can compete with other capital-intensive and low-carbons sources. Innovations like small-scale reactors and combined heat and power provision could improve the economics and the financiability of nuclear investments. At the same time, it is essential to plan for the long-term and preserve in countries like France the existing supply chain with all its skills and competencies so that new reactors can be delivered timely and cost-competitively over the next decades
The afternoon parallel session of the 1st IAEE Online Conference addressed these topics on 9 June 2021. In this interview/podcast, Nicolò Rossetto (Florence School of Regulation) and Michel Berthélemy (OECD – NEA) discuss the main takeaways.

Prof Anna Creti and I discuss what are the key issues raised while addressing SDG7 targets. Are we ready ? Do we have the data and evidence to make informed decisions ? What would be an appropriate framework to tackle the issue at the distribution end? What lessons can be learnt from experiences on the ground?
Follow the podcast to know what the panellist had to say about these questions

On Tuesday, 8 June 2021, the 1st IAEE Online Conference, the Morning Parallel Session 2.1 on ‘Energy access around the world’ took place.
The session was presided by Prof. Anna Creti, Université Paris-Dauphine.

The panellists were

– Prof. Jörg Peters, Research with Impact – RWI, ESSEN
– Prof. Ignacio Pérez-Arriaga, MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society-
– Assistant Prof. Federico Pontoni, Bocconi University

This podcast from the Gas and Climate area of the Florence School of Regulation is part of the series “IAEE online conference: Energy, Covid, and Climate Change”. In this instalment, James Kneebone of FSR is joined by Marina Holgado of the International Energy Agency (IEA) technical collaboration programme (TCP) secretariat for hydrogen.

The podcast explores the outcomes of the IAEE online conference session ‘Power-to-Hydrogen and Hydrogen-to-X’ as well as the wider work of the TCP, through the following questions:

– What is the Hydrogen TCP and more specifically ‘Task 38’? What can our viewers learn from Task 38 results?

– One of the main conclusions in Task 38 was that hydrogen was not being well represented in energy modelling scenarios, in your view, why was that? Has this changed?

On Tuesday, 8 June 2021, the 1st IAEE Online Conference, the Parallel Session 2.1 on ‘Energy Transition and Local Governance’ took place.
The session was presided by Michael Pollitt (University of Cambridge). The panellists were Marianne Laigneau (Enedis), Matthew E. Kahn (University of Southern California), Anna Alberini, (University of Maryland) and Michael Caramanis (Boston University).

In this talk, the FSR Director, Jean-Michel Glachant introduces a framework of five key building blocks (technology; energy policy; energy professionals; energy consumers; the grid) to explain why he thinks that local distribution system operators (DSOs) are back at the core of the power system today, and why the future remains uncertain.

Community energy is one of the current buzzwords in the public discourse over the electricity sector and the energy transition. Within a community, citizens can adopt new models for the production and consumption of energy. Among them, there are peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading and collective self-consumption.

In this podcast, Nicolò Rossetto (FSR) and Josh Roberts (REScoop) discuss the concept of community energy and its relation with new energy models like P2P trading and prosumption. According to Mr Roberts, community energy should not be defined by a set of activities or functions, but it is rather an organisational concept that refers to a certain type of governance. In an energy community, citizens or users must have the control and possibly the ownership of the assets used by the community itself. Third parties may be involved, but they cannot have the lead. If someone accepts this definition, then it is clear that P2P trading and collective self-consumption can be of different types and do not represent a sufficient condition for the existence of a true energy community.
This kind of distinctions is not mere details relevant for academics only. On the contrary, it may have important implications for the current transposition of the European directives into national legislation and the future of community energy in the EU.

You may listen to another interview with Josh Roberts here:

This podcast was recorded on 18th February 2020 in Florence during the second meeting (https://fsr.eui.eu/event/global-observatory-on-peer-to-peer-community-self-consumption-and-transactive-energy-models/) of the Global Observatory on Peer-to-Peer, Community Self-Consumption and Transactive Energy Models (https://userstcp.org/annex/peer-to-peer-energy-trading/), organised by the Florence School of Regulation (FSR) in cooperation with the University College London (UCL) and the financial support by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the United Kingdom.

At the 2nd edition of the FSR Innovation Bootcamp, Bjarne Steffen, senior researcher at ETH Zürich and visiting researcher at MIT, gave a presentation around his work on renewable energy financing. In this podcast, Bjarne discusses his work around the cost of capital of investments in renewables with Tim Schittekatte, researcher at the FSR. Bjarne and his co-authors found that between 2005 and 2017, the cost of capital for wind and solar reduced significantly in Germany and explains how three types of drivers contributed to this decline. Learnings around these drivers can aid to foster investment conditions for new technologies in a global context and can help to understand how the levelised cost of electricity can be impacted by changes in general interest rates. Finally, Bjarne’s findings are also important to inform policymakers when wanting to revise the renewable support schemes of which the design can strongly influence the cost of capital. Introducing support schemes that give more market signals can help to better integrate renewables but can come at an expense in terms of cost of capital.

Relevant work from Bjarne Steffen:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-018-0277-y
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0375-2

Prof. Poul Erik Morthorst of the Danish Technical University (DTU)’s ideas are clear: carbon pricing cannot be the excuse to delay or avoid investments in technology supporting renewable energy development.

On the contrary, taking immediate action could lead to short-term benefits: “We should invest in RES now, and have an immediate effect on CO2 reduction” urges Professor Morthorst. [Listen to the full podcast, recorded in the context of the FutureGas annual meeting in Vaerloese, Denmark].