Search

Eurac Research aims to include in the PIS system a CO2 emissions calculator for business travel with the objective of making collaborators conscious of the environmental impact of their activities. The overall aim is to raise the environmental awareness of Eurac Research’s collaborators and to collect data to be used to inform strategies to reduce the carbon footprint of Eurac Research activities. Within the Institute for Renewable Energy (RENENE), the Urban and Regional Group has already started working on a similar project gathering information and expertise. Considering this, it has been agreed that RENENE will conduct further research to identify the most relevant CO2 accounting methods and to collect relevant data to perform the analysis. For this purpose, existing GHG accounting standard and methodologies have been reviewed, current datasets for calculating individual travel emissions compared, and a set of emission factors selected. The selected data have been chosen based on the transparency, consistency, comparability, completeness, and accuracy of the dataset. The document is organized as follow: Chapter 2 sets the historical context and identifies the main existing methodologies. It then illustrates our approach and provides the first feedback on the existing PIS system. Chapter 3 contains a brief description of the tool and methods identified, while chapter 4 contains the reference to specific datasets. Finally, chapter 5 summarizes the conclusion and reports the selected data to be used in the PIS system to calculate the CO2 emissions of Eurac Research’s business travels.

Marginal CO2 abatement cost curves derived from bottom-up or top-down models are widely used by policymakers to determine the least-cost sequential order of decarbonization measures and the most effective decarbonization strategies. However, most model-based methods lack high temporal, sectoral, and techno-economic resolution. To address these limitations, this paper presents a linear optimization method with an hourly resolution for a sector-coupled power system to derive step-wise CO2 abatement cost curves. A step-wise marginal CO2 abatement cost curve is calculated based on hundreds of hourly dispatch model runs, giving a high level of detail on techno-economic, inter-temporal, and inter-sectoral interactions. Results demonstrate a dynamic relationship between technology-specific CO2 abatement costs, CO2 emission reductions, and total system cost development per installed decarbonization measure. Moreover, the results indicate how competing flexibility and decarbonization options interact and how least-cost decarbonization pathways can be reached.

To face environmental and energy security issues, planning an energy system with high penetration of renewables is becoming increasingly important. The EPLANopt model couples a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm to EnergyPLAN simulation software to study the future best energy mix. In this study, EPLANopt is applied to the case study of Niederösterreich, an Austrian region, to inspect the best configurations of the energy system at 2050. This model is used to inspect the competition between different renewable energy integration options. Storage systems, power to gas, power to heat or power to mobility are all integration options taken into account to study their competition in presence of electricity excess from renewables. The results show that in order to decarbonize the energy system the increase of the installed power of renewables is not enough to reach the CO2 reduction objective. Integration methods like the already mentioned storage systems, power to gas, power to heat or power to mobility become relevant. In particular the results show a deep energy efficiency refurbishment coupled to power to heat through heat pumps. Power to gas presents a relevant role in the integration of the excess of electricity from renewables. However, at the increase of electric mobility penetration the available excess of electricity is reduced and the deployment of power to gas decreases., International Journal of Sustainable Energy Planning and Management, Vol. 27 (2020): Special Issue from the 5th International Conference on Smart Energy Systems

The present paper focuses on the energy system of the municipality of Bressanone-Brixen, located in the North of Italy. The aim of this paper is to investigate various possible energy scenarios for this case study in order to improve the overall efficiency of the system. The different scenarios include high penetration of photovoltaics at urban level, considering the maximum rooftop PV potential of the local area. Different solutions have been analyzed in order to study the handling of the consequent excess of electricity production. Electric storage and a solution combining heat pumps and thermal storage have been evaluated to maximize the local use of the generated electricity. A deterministic approach (without the use of an optimization algorithm) and a heuristic optimization approach have been applied to evaluate the different possible configurations. The present analysis can be of interest for other cities in a mountain environment where the production from renewables is limited by orographic constraints, energy consumption per capita is higher and stronger resiliency to climate change is needed., International Journal of Sustainable Energy Planning and Management, Vol 10 (2016)