• energy systems
• management
• model
• planning
• sensitivity analysis

The analysis of global energy context provides the problems related to the energy consumption as the fossil fuels supply and consumption, the increasing carbon emissions and costs of energy systems management. Diffusion of renewable sources have provided opportunities to face these problems, but also has increased the complexity turning the systems into multi-energy systems. Analysis of multi-energy systems provides several challenges for researchers due to the interaction of multiple parameters. The role of management and planning, the control of the many different parameters and the coordination of different systems, play a key role to set economic and environmental strategies. Thus the need of new methodological approaches for the analysis of systems. The present work allowed the selection of three available tools able to study energy systems issues and then to implement them on specific economic and environmental scenarios connected to the diffusion of renewables in Italy. The present work concerns an applied and quantitative research approach by simulation where the construction of computer modelling is used to generate data in a controlled environment and parameters can be manipulated to study their effects on other behaviours. This approach is useful to understand possible future conditions of systems.
The research is the result of a 5 months internship at the Nuclear, Plasma and Radiological Engineering Department (NPRE) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The internship is part of MoU with the University of Pisa. The research has been developed in the framework of the ‘Partnerships for International Research and Education (PIRE): Nuclear Energy Systems and Materials under Extreme Conditions’ funded by the USA National Science Foundation (NSF).