Arnau Aliana
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Aliana
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Arnau
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03695 - Hoffmann, Volker / Hoffmann, Volker
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- Co-designing policy mixes and energy systems for decarbonisation: Expanding the role of energy system modelsItem type: Doctoral ThesisAliana, Arnau (2025)Climate change represents one of the greatest challenges of our time, driven primarily by CO₂ emissions from global energy production and use. Our continued reliance on fossil fuels locks in carbon-intensive infrastructures and practices, making transformation difficult despite the availability of mature low-carbon technologies across sectors. Policies are key to overcoming this lock-in, as they can address structural, economic, and institutional barriers, guide investments, and accelerate the deployment of more sustainable alternatives. However, designing effective policies remains a complex task. Single instruments are rarely sufficient, so governments rely on policy mixes that can complement each other and enhance overall effectiveness. These mixes must be designed with careful consideration of how instruments interact with each other and with the evolving energy system. Most research on designing policy mixes relies on qualitative ex-post studies, which are valuable for contextual insights but less suited to systematically testing many options or charting the co-evolution of policies and energy systems. This calls for quantitative approaches able to explore alternatives and assess interactions over time, such as energy system models (ESMs). Bottom-up ESMs, with their detailed techno-economic representation, are theoretically well-suited to inform ex-ante policy design and assess system-wide impacts. Yet their application to this task remains limited: most studies rely on scenario-based approaches that treat policies as fixed inputs, offering little support for exploring alternative mixes or assessing instrument interactions. Addressing this gap requires methods that integrate policy and system design within a single framework, enabling the analysis of their coevolution with a long-term perspective. This thesis takes up this challenge by asking: How can energy system models be used to support the ex-ante co-design of policy mixes and energy systems for cost-efficient decarbonisation? To address this question, the thesis comprises four studies. Study I reviews a representative sample of recent studies using bottom-up ESMs for diverse policy-relevant analyses, examining how they represent policy instruments, construct scenarios, choose performance indicators, and address sector coupling. It identifies dominant practices such as the focus on CO₂ pricing and the reliance on scenario analysis, and highlights underexplored aspects including policy interactions and cost distribution, underscoring the need for more integrated approaches. Study II presents the thesis’ core methodological contribution: MANGOpol, a bi-level optimisation framework for the co-design of energy systems and policy mixes for decarbonisation. This simultaneous optimisation of technology investments and operations, and the selection and sequencing of a broad range of policy instruments ensures that policy and system design are developed together, reflecting their interdependent nature. Studies III and IV apply this framework to co-design policy mixes and energy systems in two real-world cases of high relevance for decarbonisation: the Swiss residential building sector and the German electricity system. In the building sector case, MANGOpol compares uniform and tailored policy mixes for a heterogeneous building stock, assessing how differences in building type and age affect technology adoption and the choice of policy instruments. In the case of the German electricity system, MANGOpol is extended to identify both optimal and near-optimal solutions in order to reveal multiple cost-efficient decarbonisation pathways with varying technology choices, policy designs, and cost distributions. Overall, the contributions and findings of this thesis demonstrate that integrating policy and system design is essential for effective decarbonisation. For policymakers, they show that coordinated policy mixes combining complementary instruments can deliver deeper decarbonisation at lower cost than single-instrument strategies. They also highlight that early and well-sequenced interventions reduce overall costs, that tailoring policy design to sectoral heterogeneity can enable a more strategic use of instruments, and that different combinations of policies and technologies can achieve comparable performance. For modellers, the thesis demonstrates how embedding policy design into bottom-up ESMs enables systematic exploration of alternative policy mixes, assessment of their interactions with system change, and identification of robust solutions beyond predefined scenarios. In doing so, it expands the role of bottom-up ESMs from passive assessment tools to active decision-support framework for the co-design of cost-efficient decarbonisation pathways that can directly inform policymaking.
- PATHFNDR Consortium; Aliana, Arnau; Bellizio, Federica; et al. (2025)Switzerland’s energy transition relies on electrifying transportation and heating while keeping electricity generation low in greenhouse gas emissions and ensuring grid stability. The required energy system flexibility will still be provided mainly by hydropower. However, additional valuable demand-side flexibility could be provided by electric vehicles and heat pumps by shifting their consumption to align with renewable energy generation. This report evaluates the role of electric vehicle and heat pump flexibility by synthesizing research from across the PATHFNDR project consortium. The report thus quantifies these technologies' potential flexibility and value in supporting both the transmission and distribution systems and assesses existing and required market and policy mechanisms to unlock their full benefits. New scenario-based modelling results show that flexibility provision from electric vehicles and heat pumps can reduce system costs, defer network upgrade investments, lower electricity prices and imports, and reduce curtailment of renewable energy by better aligning demand with surplus generation. Electric vehicle smart charging and vehicle-to-grid can act as energy storage, which shift or discharge electricity to support the grid. Heat pump demand can be shifted using thermal inertia and thermal energy storage to reduce peak demand and stabilize the grid. At distribution level, flexibility-aware planning can reduce or defer low- and medium-voltage grid upgrades with minimal PV energy loss. Our research also finds that enabling flexibility-readiness through supportive policy and market mechanisms are critical for effective demand-side management. Some mechanisms are already in place, such as contracts with dynamic pricing, direct load control, and subsidies for smart charging and vehicle-to-grid infrastructure. However, further policies, changes to regulation, and owner/user acceptance are needed. Surveys of the Swiss public show that support for flexible EV charging and heat pump operation is high, indicating readiness for further policy and market changes supporting flexibility and renewable energy integration. Unlocking this flexibility will improve Switzerland’s energy resilience and sustainability while empowering consumers to participate actively in grid management. Future research should focus on scalable implementation and deployment: exploring business models for flexibility provision, evaluating new policy incentives, and demonstrating the use of flexibility at scale.
- Analysis of the Net Metering Schemes for PV Self-Consumption in DenmarkItem type: Journal Article
- Performance assessment of using various solar radiation data in modelling large-scale solar thermal systems integrated in district heating networksItem type: Journal Article
Publications 1 - 4 of 4