Travel support recipient: Parveen PeethambaranInstitution: Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, IndiaArea of work: Embedding Firm Dispatchable Capacity (FDC) constraints into OSeMOSYS-based deep decarbonisation modelling for India’s power sector.External event: PRISMA Summer School
PRISMA Summer School was a five-day residential programme for advanced PhD students and early postdocs working on computational energy and climate modelling. Organised by the University of Geneva as part of the Horizon Europe PRISMA project, it brought together an international cohort for lectures, hands-on modelling sessions, student presentations, and collaborative group work. Faculty included leading researchers from CIRED, ETH Zurich, Oxford, TU Delft, and CNR Italy.
What did you present on?
As part of the summer school, I had presented the doctoral research on embedding Firm Dispatchable Capacity (FDC) constraints into OSeMOSYS-based deep decarbonisation modelling for India’s power sector. It showcased the FDC constraint framework across six scenarios and technology-mix findings on coal CCS, nuclear, and storage as reliability anchors under rising variable renewable penetration.
The Summer School imparted various methods of handling uncertainty, such as Explainable Artificial Intelligence (Ex-AI), Robust Decision-Making using Scenario Discovery, Decision Tree Method, and Global Sensitivity Analysis. The school had also organised hands-on sessions on the various methods taught and it became handy for participants to implement them in respective research scenarios. As part of the Summer School, a group project was undertaken on the application of Scenario Discovery method using PRIM algorithm to evaluate net-zero transition scenarios for Middle East and Africa based on IPCC Scenarios. The results were presented in the summer school and provided an excellent platform for working with members from different parts of the globe.
Thoughts on the experience…
The RE-CONNECT Travel grant enabled me to attend the summer school and expand my capability in handling uncertainties in the energy system research scenarios I was working on, in the case of India. In the past, I was only using scenario analysis for handling various uncertainties. The Summer School enabled me to gain expertise on various uncertainty handling methodologies which could find use in furthering research to enable robust policy making for countries like India.
Also, the Summer School directly built competency in PRIM and scenario discovery applicable to the ongoing doctoral work on deep decarbonisation pathways for India’s power sector, where technology uncertainty is a key unresolved dimension. Group work on Middle East and Africa scenarios provided first-hand experience in applying Scenario discovery workflows to emerging-economy IAM data, which is directly transferable to India’s decarbonisation context under structural constraints.
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