ISTP News

In our final colloquium talk of this semester, Prof. Konstantinos Boulouchos from ETH Zurich's Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering will talk about a "net-zero" mobility future, and he will illustrate the synergetic contributions of technology innovation and policy design. He will also focus on the energy supply and climate change mitigation options for the worldwide and national transportation systems.

Our next colloquium talk will take place online on Tuesday, 13th October 2020, at 5pm. The invited guest speaker, Dr. Bjarne Steffen will talk about the role of finance in climate policy. Mitigating dangerous climate change requires a rapid transition of economies towards low-carbon technologies. Bjarne Steffen will elaborate on the interplay between interest rates and the politics of emissions trading.

Climate change mitigation has been politicized in many countries, potentially blocking the introduction of climate policies. Publicly funded green investment banks are one policy instrument that mobilizes private finance into national opportunities. ETH researchers incl. ISTP member Prof. Tobias Schmidt analysed the parliamentary discourse behind the design of two cases of green investment banks. Their results produce observations allowing to develop four propositions for further investigation.

Solar photovoltaics and batteries are key technologies to enable a rapid decarbonization of electricity systems. ETH Energy Politics Group´s researchers including ISTP Member Prof. Tobias Schmidt developed a model for photovoltaics and battery projects, which returns a profit-maximizing storage dispatch and system design, and investigated South-East Asian countries. Their results indicate that profitable investment opportunities in photovoltaics and battery projects exist already today.

The RESPONSE Doctoral Programme (DP) «RESPONSE - to society and policy needs through plant, food and energy sciences» builds on the academic expertise of three world-leading institutions - ETH Zurich, University of Zurich and University of Basel - and the three internationally renowned competence centers Zurich-Basel Plant Science Center (PSC), the World Food System Center and Energy Science Center. It will start in February 2020.

Societies face increasingly complex and dynamic problems, with climate change being one of the most notable examples. Researchers from the ETH Energy Politics Group, including ISTP member Prof. Tobias Schmidt, investigated the interaction between regulatory instruments to address such problems. Based on a case study on energy efficiency in buildings in Switzerland, they found a symbiotic interaction between public and private regulation that leads to ratcheting-up of regulatory stringency.

What does the COVID-19 crisis imply for the energy transition required to keep global warming at bay? A commentary written by Bjarne Steffen, Florian Egli, Michael Pahle and ETH Prof. Tobias Schmidt aims to help energy policymakers navigate through the crisis. In their view, structuring the challenges that arise in different time horizons and offering guiding principles for responses are most useful at this stage.

ISTP PhD student Yael Borofsky, along with PhDs and Post-Docs from 7 other groups at ETH Zurich and the Energy Science Center, have launched the Energy Blog @ ETH Zurich, a new platform for discussions on energy policy, science, technology, and business.