Hi! I’m Lorenzo Cassetti, and I’m a PhD student within the IUSS Pavia PhD SDC programme. My research belongs to CU3 Technology and Territory, and is related to energy systems models: tools developed to support decision makers, such as public administrations and companies, in developing their energies strategies. My Italian hosting institute is Relab, a research group in Politecnico di Milano.
Once I got my master’s degree in Energy Engineering, I was interested in two main job fields, namely consultancy and research, and after a brief experience in a consultancy start-up I run into the PhD SDC call for application. Despite the stimulating environment, the research offer provided by PhD SDC intrigued me because it focuses on topics related to the current challenge represented by climate changes, giving people the chance to actively contribute to worldwide shared effort of a more responsible and sustainable human society. Furthermore, the wide field of studies present in the programme and the strong commitment towards a transdisciplinary approach to research make of PhD SDC a unique opportunity to all those who are interested in a stimulating research environment, where the research question can be easily be seen under different point of views (such as technical, economical, social and ethical).
I’m currently spending my PhD abroad period in Vancouver, Canada. The hosting institute is the Simon Fraser University, where the Delta E+ research group is developing integrated CLEW (Climate, Land, Energy and Water) models to support policy makers in enacting decarbonization policies. The first impact was pretty scary for what concerned the research point of view, being CLEW models characterized by greater complexities with respect to sector-specific ones, such as energy system models. Luckily, Delta E+ members were kind and patient enough to help me understand the structure and the rationale behind their models, being of great support also for the conceptual phase in which I had to find the best way to connect my research with their projects. The fact that the group is restricted (15 members in total, all with different professional and cultural backgrounds) helped to create an informal environment, that promotes the share of doubts, difficulties and ideas.
As for almost every aspect of PhD research, I faced some adversities mainly related to model development. My work here is focused on enhancing the information provided by Delta E+ model aimed to investigate possible decarbonization pathways for British Columbia. This enhancement is obtained through the soft link of an optimization model that will detail the potential hydrogen network in British Columbia. Such process has been (and still is) challenging for a variety of reasons, among which: difficulties in retrieving data (most of energy-related data are sensitive), data manipulation in order to have homogenous dataset to use as model inputs (energy systems models needs many data, such as energy demand, production, transmission divided per sector, and usually they have to be retrieved by many different sources that do not have a common data storage structure) and link-related strategies identification (being CLEW models themselves the result of interactions among different models, each model could be at a different stage, and sometimes is difficult to define the inputs of a model when they are the undefined output of another model).
My experience here in Canada is surely enriching both from a professional and personal perspective. It allows me to apply the knowledge and tools developed in the first two years of PhD to a different problem, and the work I’m developing here will be the object of the third and last paper of my thesis. I also feel that I’m contributing to Delta E+ research, to the point that my hosting tutor is interested in extending the work I proposed for the hydrogen network to BC electricity transmission line.
An aspect that I particularly enjoy of Vancouver is that it hosts a great variety of cultures. In the time I have been here I had the chance to meet people from all over the world, all with their backgrounds, traditions and beliefs. For the first time I saw how festivities such as Halloween and Thanksgiving are celebrated in North America, I learned the basic rules of football to see the Superball and enjoyed watching NBA matches live. But also, I had the opportunity to taste traditional foods of my coworkers countries, among which Costa Rica, Korea, Iran and Ethiopia (and I also hosted an Italian dinner, where I burned the homemade pizza and had to buy it from a Napolitan pizzeria but, shhhhh)!