François Vuille

• Managing Director at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne

The global energy transition relies increasingly on lithium-ion batteries for electric transportation and renewable energy integration. Given the highly concentrated supply chain of battery materials, importing regions have a strategic imperative to reduce their reliance on battery material imports through, e.g., battery recycling or reuse. We inve...

Problem definition: Vehicle-to-grid increases the low utilization rate of privately owned electric vehicles by making their batteries available to electricity grids. We formulate a robust optimization problem that maximizes a vehicle owner’s expected profit from selling primary frequency regulation to the grid and guarantees that market commitments...

Low-carbon societies will need to store vast amounts of electricity to balance intermittent generation from wind and solar energy, for example, through frequency regulation. Here, we derive an analytical solution to the decision-making problem of storage operators who sell frequency regulation power to grid operators and trade electricity on day-ah...

The numbers of electric vehicles (EV) will increase as many countries perceive EVs as a solution to reduce the emissions of transportation and therefore incentivize their adoption. However, the deployment of public charging infrastructure is lagging behind that of EVs, which represents a potential barrier to the wide-scale adoption. The objective o...

Vehicle-to-grid increases the low utilization rate of privately owned electric vehicles by making their batteries available to the electricity grid. We formulate a robust optimization problem in continuous time that maximizes the expected profit from selling primary frequency regulation to the grid and guarantees that vehicle owners can meet their...

Sustainability Assessment of Urban Systems - edited by Claudia R. Binder March 2020

The transition towards decarbonized and efficient energy systems has broad socio-economic implications. We estimate the potential impacts on employment from efforts in energy efficiency in industry, transport and buildings as well as substituting local renewable energy sources for fossil fuels. Both energy supply and demand are accounted for. We us...

Decoupling energy consumption and carbon emissions from economic growth is at the core of the climate change debate: successful decoupling is evidence that efficiency measures can be economically sustainable. In this article, the authors analyze the underlying nature of this decoupling in the European Union from 1990 to 2014. The objective is to qu...

The transition from a fossil fuel base to a renewable energy system relies on materials and, in particular, metals to manufacture and maintain energy conversion technologies. Supply constraints shift from fossil fuels to mineral resources. We assess the availability of metal reserves and resources to build an energy system based exclusively on rene...

Decoupling economic growth from energy consumption is a wide spread attempt to decarbonize economic activities and increase energy security. Almost all members of the European Union have decoupled the two since 2005 as measured by a steady decline in energy intensity, the ratio of final energy consumption and gross domestic product. Economic growth...

Woody biomass, a renewable energy resource, accumulates solar energy in form of carbon hydrates produced from atmospheric CO2 and H2O. It is, therefore, a means of CO2 mitigation for society as long as the biogenic carbon released to the atmosphere when delivering its energy content by oxidation can be accumulated again during growth of new woody b...

In light of the environmental consequences of linear production and consumption processes, the circular economy (CE) is gaining momentum as a concept and practice, promoting closed material cycles by focusing on multiple strategies from material recycling to product reuse, as well as rethinking production and consumption chains toward increased res...

Several analyses and qualitative arguments excluded resonant mode coupling and nonlinear driving as the main nonlinear processes responsible for the presence of the numerous cross-frequencies in the temporal spectrum of GD 358. Rather, harmonic distortion is the prime cause. We believe that the nonlinear response of the convection zone to the oscil...

A bi-directional power transfer between electric vehicles and the electricity grid, commonly referred to as vehicle-to-grid (V2G), offers the possibility to pair fluctuating electricity production with the fluctuating availability of electric vehicles parked at charging stations. V2G is envisaged as an option for grid balancing, in particular in re...

The sustainable development goals (SDGs) challenge markets, regulators and practitioners to achieve multiple objectives on water, food and energy. This calls for responses that are coordinated and scaled appropriately. Learning from water– energy–food nexus could support much-needed building of links between the separate SDGs. The concept has highl...

Seasonal storage potential

Microalgae have a significant potential to be a sustainable source of fuel and thus are of interest in the transition to a sustainable energy system, in particular for resource-dependent countries such as Switzerland. Independence of fossil fuels, considerable reduction of CO2 emissions, and abandoning nuclear energy may be possible with an integra...

Les propriétaires immobiliers du canton de Vaud font très peu appel aux subventions du Programme Bâtiments qui encourage les rénovations énergétiques. L’étude «Analyse des barrières à l'assainissement énergétique des bâtiments dans le canton de Vaud» mandatée par le Canton de Vaud a permis d’identifier certaines causes et propose des mesures pour r...

This report was jointly prepared for IEA Bioenergy by the Energy Research Centre of the Netherlands (ECN), E4tech, Chalmers University of Technology, and the Copernicus Institute of the University of Utrecht. The purpose of the report was to produce an authoritative review of the entire bioenergy sector aimed at policy and investment decision maker...

The introduction of hydrogen in transport, particularly using fuel cell vehicles, faces a number of technical and non-technical hurdles. However, their relative importance is unclear, as are the levels of concern accorded them within the expert community conducting research and development within this area. To understand what issues are considered...

We present a detailed mode identification performed on the 1994 Whole Earth Telescope (WET) run on GD 358. The results are compared with that obtained for the same star from the 1990 WET data. The two temporal spectra show very few qualitative differences, although amplitude changes are seen in most modes, including the disappearance of the mode id...

In each season when the DA pulsating white dwarf G29–38 has been observed, its period spectrum appears very different, but it always contains a forest of harmonics and cross-frequencies. The ratio of the amplitude of these non-linear frequencies Ac to the product of the amplitudes of the corresponding parent modes A1A2 has been measured. The result...

An analysis of the phase spectrum of the DA pulsating white dwarf G29-38 over many seasons has been performed. This complements a companion paper which analyses the evolution of the temporal spectrum of G29-38. We show that, with one exception, the relative phases of the harmonics and combination frequencies are all oscillating in phase with their...

An analysis of the evolution of the amplitude spectrum over many seasons of the DA pulsating white dwarf G29-38 has been performed. Neither beating nor resonant mode coupling can account for the observed appearance and disappearance of modes, although some of them clearly grow while others get damped. Therefore some unknown non-adiabatic, non-linea...

The concept of parallel confocal microscopy with aperture de-correlation has been developed in order to reduce acquisition time and to increase light efficiency over conventional scanning confocal microscopy. It consists in simultaneously observing numerous confocal volumes of a specimen, in lieu of scanning one confocal spot over the region of int...

We present a detailed mode identification performed on the 1994 Whole Earth Telescope (WET) run on GD 358. The results are compared with that obtained for the same star from the 1990 WET data. The two temporal spectra show very few qualitative differences, although amplitude changes are seen in most modes, including the disappearance of the mode id...