D. Poli

University of Pisa | UNIPI · Department of Energy, Systems, Territory and Construction Engineering

To grant reliable and affordable electricity provision to non-electrified communities, proper system sizing, based on accurate demand estimation is crucial. However, the absence of historical data, and scarce, scattered, and often unreliable pre-electrification surveys, make this process particularly prone to errors. Acquiring data, especially with...

Renewable Energy Communities can become relevant flexibility actors thanks to their capability of gathering under the same ecosystem, different energy assets, such as generation, and storage, and deferrable and controllable devices such as heavy appliances and computing assets. Particularly thanks to the integration of different energy storages REC...

This paper’s research question is to evaluate the potential impact of large numbers of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) on the future electric grid, and whether the flexibility of BEV charging can induce enough system benefits to remunerate BEV users for the change in their recharging pattern. The considered scenario refers to the Italian situation...

Energy Communities are increasingly proposed as a tool to boost renewable penetration and maximize citizen participation in energy matters. These policies enable the formation of legal entities that bring together power system members, enabling collective investment and operation of energy assets. However, designing appropriate reward schemes is cr...

Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) are an emerging policy instrument to support the installations of new renewable energy power plants. However, their design requires an appropriate technical and financial expertise, which are time-consuming and require trained personnel. For these reasons, digital platforms for REC design have been proposed to su...

Preprint, full article available at DOI The energy transition is a major challenge that knows no borders and requires a systematic change in the energy production, consumption and transport. These challenges can be effectively tackled only through collaborative efforts. Accordingly, to simplify cooperation and increase transparency for policy and...

Governments are promoting energy community (EC) policies to encourage joint investment and the operation of shared energy assets by citizens, industries, and public authorities, with the aim of promoting economic, social, and environmental benefits. However, ECs require appropriate planning and energy management strategies, which require data that...

This document presents a study on the use of battery energy storage systems in a proposed renewable energy community in Savona, UNIGE Campus. The study compares the outcomes of cooperative approaches with and without flexibility services to a scenario where users do not cooperate. The study concludes that storage systems of relevant size can create...

Macro-energy system modelling is used by decision-makers to steer the global energy transition towards an affordable, sustainable and reliable future. Closed-source models are the current standard for most policy and industry decisions. However, open models have proven to be competitive alternatives that promote science, robust technical analysis,...

The energy transition requires huge investments. However, increasing citizen participation in the energy system by providing flexibility and decentralized generation and storage could provide relief and reduce the total system costs. In this regard, several governments are promoting the development of aggregations of users, sometimes in the form of...

This paper proposes a business model based on the Water Energy Food (WEF) nexus that could benefit from advanced optimal planning tools based on techniques of multi-year optimization under uncertainties. The authors highlight the potential impact of WEF nexus in the mini-grid sector and suggest that appropriate forecasts and optimization tools are...

Energy Access is a pivotal need for socio-economic growth. Proven to be a key enabler of development and progress, access to electricity has been prioritized by governments using grid extension actions and off-grid solutions, namely microgrids and home systems technologies, fed by renewable sources. However, achieving universal access to energy is...

To grant a reliable and affordable electricity provision to non-electrified communities, proper system sizing, based on accurate demand estimation is crucial. However, the absence of historical data, coupled with scarce, scattered and often unreliable pre-electrification surveys, makes this process particularly prone to errors. Acquiring data, espe...

The development of distributed energy generation, often aggregated to form micro- or nano- grids based on power generation from renewable sources, or small-size generators make it easier to electrify remote and isolated areas. In addition to privately owned generation capacities, it could be feasible and profitable to sell/buy the excess energy to/...

Residential battery storage to perform load shifting and demand side management has become of utmost importance to improve hosting capacity, increase renewable energy penetration and meet environmental targets, especially with energy community policies. As the lifetime of electrochemical batteries depends upon their scheduling and environmental con...

When designing a microgrid, developers usually regard economic metrics, and occasionally consider reliability and environmental aspects. However, sociopolitical, supply chain, and geographical facets, among others, are often never included in project-design because they are really difficult to model, especially, in the context of developing countri...

Degradation mechanism of batteries has to be carefully studied when considering their utilization in electrical power systems. This paper presents the results of an extensive experimental campaign, through which three different lithium–iron–phosphate (LFP) cells were subjected to different electrical cycling stresses. The purpose of the campaign wa...

The integration of electricity and gas systems is a key priority for the energy transition. Alongside electricity, low-carbon energy vectors, such as Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) or hydrogen, are required in future energy systems. Hence, regasification systems, often located nearby port areas, will be strategic assets promoting environmental, social...

Lithium cells are typically modeled through equivalent electrical networks whose parameters are tuned to closely match measured data. In this way, complicated experimental procedures are often needed to correctly achieve the actual battery behavior. After the testing, simulation models are fitted on experimental data through optimization algorithms...

Achieving the maximum economic profitability is a priority for microgrid developers. However, although economic indicators usually dominate the business decision making, rarely numerical indicators are fully able to capture the entire sociopolitical, technical and geographical circumstances affecting the business environment, especially in rural ar...

CAPEX reduction by 25-50% and NPC reduction by 20% for a 10 year investment including battery degradation. The optimal planning of off-grid microgrids in developing countries is complex, as several political and socioeconomic risks can hamper investments of private companies. Estimating the energy demand and its growth is a challenging task, subjec...

Microgrids play a pivotal role in the attempts to achieve universal access to electricity; hence, their accurate planning, which also includes the evolution of the system over the project lifetime, is essential for maximizing the profitability of the investments. This paper proposes an iterative multi-year mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) op...

Doi: 10.1016/j.epsr.2021.107053 CAPEX reduction by 25-50% and NPC reduction by 20% for a 10 year investment including battery degradation (see published paper at DOI). The optimal planning of off-grid microgrids in developing countries is particularly challenging, as several political and socioeconomic risks can hamper investments of private compan...

Stochastic operation of power systems has risen attention of researchers as fluctuating energy sources like renewables are being increasingly integrated into existing grids. Uncertainties can be higher in small power systems like isolated microgrids, where both renewables and load can be extremely unpredictable, thus causing increasing operating co...

Link: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/energies/special_issues/Off-Grid_Power_Systems Electricity is essential for modern services, appliances and communication devices, but quality of supply and reliability are very diverse worldwide. Off-grid systems can be cost-effective solutions for providing reliable service also in unconventional situations and...

Achieving universal electrification is a challenging goal for governments in developing countries; the traditional approach of extending the national grid to rural areas has been usually pursued but since many communities are located far from the national grid, this approach may be sub-optimal. Hybrid microgrids, composed by renewables, batteries a...

This paper presents a technique to estimate the State-Of-Charge of lithium cells, based on a Luenberger state estimator. Although this approach is not new, in this paper several practical implementation details are discussed, including techniques to find numerical parameters of the required cell model with tests that give enough precision with limi...

Designing off-grid microgrids is a costly and risky activity, especially for newly electrified communities in developing countries. Private developers and researcher have been using several economic indicators to value the profitability of an investment, such as Net Present Value, Discounted Payback Period, Levelized Cost of Electricity; however, e...

Dataset of beyond 60 load profiles from microgrids in developing countries, including socio-economic, weather and geographical data and clustering analyses

The most common system for railway high‐speed lines electric supply and the somehow de‐facto standard is a special AC industrial frequency system called 2 × 25 kV system. Although several studies exist showing the performance of this system in frequency and time domains, there is a lack of studies analysing how geometric parameters influence the sy...

Stochastic operating strategies have proven to achieve cheaper resource scheduling both in large power systems and microgrids, but suffer from high computational requirements with respect to traditional deterministic approaches; therefore, using stochastic formulations in advanced infra-daily operating strategies is quite challenging, especially in...

This work presents an optimization strategy and the cost-optimal design of an off-grid building served by an energy system involving solar technologies, thermal and electrochemical storages. Independently from the multi-objective method (e.g., utility function) and algorithm used (e.g., genetic algorithms), the optimization of this kind of systems...

Achieving universal electricity access is a serious challenge that developing countries are facing with. Decentralized systems are widely recognized as part of the solution, especially for remote areas where traditional approaches would be too expensive. In particular, mini-grids, which are local systems conceived to produce and distribute electric...

Extended version: 10.3390/en13164214 Mini-grids are well known to be a suitable solution to foster rural electrification in developing countries, and yet risks and high costs are hampering their spreading. Even though effective tools can help developers to identify the optimal design and operation of a mini-grid, no standard approach have emerged...

Dynamic Thermal Rating (DTR) monitors the temperatures of conductors, or uses weather and load forecasting to estimate their future trend, in order to calculate the actual capacity of a transmission line. By fully exploiting the real performances of conductors corresponding to the current weather conditions, DTR provides Transmission System Operato...

The large amount of renewable energy sources (RESs) recently integrated within the electric power systems across the world poses new challenges for their operation. Among several viable solutions, energy storage systems are the most promising to increase reliability and flexibility. This paper proposes a novel topological and probabilistic approach...

The governments of developing countries struggle to guarantee the universal access to electricity on their territory and 1.2 billion people are still without any service, especially in remote areas. Hybrid mini-grids (hybrid power systems) can be an effective solution to rural electrification since they exploit local renewable resources integrated...

Nowadays the electric power system is facing new challenges related to the integration of renewable sources, more and more frequently combined with energy storage systems. The use of these technologies is very promising, although it requires sophisticated control architectures in order to successfully balance the intermittence and unpredictability...

Nowadays the electric power system is facing new challenges related to the integration of renewable sources, more and more frequently combined with energy storage systems. The use of these technologies is very promising, although it requires sophisticated control architectures in order to successfully balance the intermittence and unpredictability...

Rural electrification in remote areas of developing countries has several challenges which hinder energy access to the population. For instance, the extension of the national grid to provide electricity in these areas is largely not viable. The Kenyan Government has put a target to achieve universal energy access by the year 2020. To realize this o...

Nowadays, the energy storage technology is bringing new opportunities to the power systems, not only providing the electric grid with regulation, reserve and backup services, but also filling the gap between the timing of production and consumption. This enables price arbitrage techniques, aimed at maximising the economic revenue obtained by chargi...

In the last years, energy storage systems are increasingly involved in applications in which they are required to deliver or adsorb significant charging or discharging currents in short intervals of time, typically a few seconds. Thanks to their high specific power, supercapacitors may represent one of the most promising technologies for this kind...

Hybrid mini-grids, which are isolated power systems, are promising solutions to fosterthe universal electricity access in developing countries. While renewable sources, possibly combined with energy storage devices, help in reducing the environmental impact and the operationalcosts of electricity supply, a backup diesel generator can increasethe co...

The extended version of this acticity is: https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0378779618300920 Nowadays, isolated power systems, also known as mini-grids, can provide reliable and cheap electricity also to far communities of developing countries. Diesel generators can ensure backup power, in addition to renewable sources and energy stora...