ETD Chair

Electricity and Digital Transition

Context

Launched in 2018, this Chair, supported by the AFI (Association pour la Formation dans l'Industrie), is entirely devoted to two of the most important and stimulating topics facing the energy industry today: electricity and digitalization. The electricity sector has undergone many changes since the beginning of its market liberalisation. We are seeing intense developments and new trends in terms of generation, transmission and distribution in a carbon-constrained world.

The Chair and its associated research and training activities will provide a better understanding and analysis of these new trends and developments.

The aim of the Chair is to address not only the electricity sector and related issues, but also the techno-economic impact of digitalization trends in the electricity industry. Large-scale data, real-time information, artificial intelligence and machine learning methods are increasingly an integral part of future electrical systems.
 

Teaching, research and outreach: the 3 objectives of the Chair

The ETD Chair operates in three main areas:

• Teaching

The Chair aims to promote the teaching of digitalization, economics and electricity management at IFP School. In doing so, the Chair will seek to stimulate the interest of our graduate students in research on the economics of power systems and digital transitions.

• Research

In terms of research, the Chair's ambition is two-fold: on the one hand, to catalyze the development of research in the fields of digitalization, electricity economics and management, and on the other hand, to establish a dialogue between industry and the School with the aim of directing research activities in this field towards the most prominent topics.

• Outreach

The Chair strives to make research results known through publications, the organization of conferences and participation in scientific associations.

Chair holder

Dr Arash Farnoosh, Supervisor of the Executive Master of Management in Energy, taught in partnership with the BI Norwegian Business School.

Steering Committee

The steering committee of the ETD Chair is composed of the following members:

• IFP School: Dr. Christine Travers, Dr. Maxime Schenckery, Dr. Arash Farnoosh
• IFP Energies nouvelles: Dr. François Kalaydjian

It also relies on external scientific advisors: Dr. Ramteen Sioshansi (Ohio State Univ., USA), Dr. Albert Banal-Estanol (Univ. Barcelona, Spain; Univ. of London, UK), Dr. Alain Haurie (Univ. of Geneva, Switzerland; HEC Montréal, Canada).

From research areas to concrete achievements...
 

• Teaching

In terms of teaching at the School, the work of the Chair has already allowed to:
- create a teaching unit "Digitalization in electricity sector" for the Energy Technology Economics and Management (ETEM) and Energy and Markets (ENM) programs, in May 2019;
- integrate case studies on the economics and optimization of electricity networks in the teaching units related to the technico-economics of the electricity sector, within the ETEM and ENM programs and the Master's degree in Environmental, Energy and Transport Economics (EEET) research-oriented master's degree, since September 2018.

• Research

A doctoral thesis on the analysis of the economic and technical challenges associated with the integration of renewable energies into electricity grids, in partnership with the Economix laboratory at the University of Paris Nanterre, began in January 2019.

The PhD candidate was Pierre Cayet, who was under the co-direction of Dr. Arash Farnoosh and Dr. Lionel Ragot, a researcher at the Economix laboratory, holder of the Economic Transitions Chair and scientific advisor to the CEPII (Centre d'Études Prospectives et d'Informations Internationales). Mr. Cayet defended his thesis on December 17, 2021 and received the jury's acclaim.

The thesis work focuses on the economic stakes associated with the integration of renewable energies (ENR) into the network. These lead to an interest in the collective surplus associated with this integration and its distribution among the different actors involved, network, producers, distributors and consumers of electricity. They thus concern the impact of the modes of integration and management of intermittent RE on the determination of electricity prices in the market.

A second doctoral thesis entitled “How to reconcile environmental and geostrategic issues in the energy mix evolution of emerging economies?” started in March 2023 in partnership with CNRS. The PhD student is Julie Corberand, and it is supervised jointly by Dr. Arash Farnoosh and Dr. Lionel Ragot from University of Paris Nanterre.  

This research aims to better understand the socio-economic issues associated with the development and evolution of the electricity mix in developing countries. To do so, it assesses the effects of integrating geopolitical, economic, and environmental uncertainties in different selected scenarios and their impact on the total cost of the electricity mix and consequently on the associated social welfare. Finally, a comparative analysis based on the results of the above studies illustrates the similarities and especially the differences of each national technology mix and associated energy policies.

In parallel of these thesis works, in the second half of 2019, we welcomed Professor Peter Cowling (Univ. of York, UK), a specialist in optimization and algorithms, as a "Visiting Researcher". The aim of this collaboration was to develop courses and research work in decision sciences and mathematical programming applied to the energy sector.

Outreach

Publications in journals such as ENERGY, Energy Policy, Sustainability...:

• D. Zhang, A. Farnoosh and F. Lantz, 2022. Does something change in the oil market with the COVID-19 crisis? International Economics, Elsevier.
• H. Mohammed and A. Farnoosh, 2022. Optimal investment scenarios for the power generation mix development of Iraq, Journal of Energy and Development, ICEED.
• Wang J., Farnoosh A., et al., 2021. A game-theory analysis of electric vehicle adoption in Beijing under license plate control policy, ENERGY, Elsevier.
• Y. QI, A. Farnoosh, et al., 2021. Coupling Coordination Analysis of China's Provincial Water-Energy-Food Nexus, Journal of Environmental Science and Pollution Research, Springer.
• D. Zhang, A. Farnoosh and Z. Ma, 2021. Does the launch of Shanghai crude oil futures stabilize the spot market? A financial cycle perspective, International Economic Journal, Taylor & Francis.
• A. Farnoosh, Z. Zou and T. McNamara, 2021. Risk analysis in green supply chain management for strategic decision-making within the framework of environmental and anti-consumption behavior, Journal of Strategic Change, Briefings in Entrepreneurial Finance, Wiley.
• Farnoosh A. and Almusawi H.M.E., 2021. Economic analysis of the electricity mix in Iraq using portfolio optimization approach, International Energy Journal, AIT. 
• Farnoosh A., Yao X., et al., 2021. Quantifying virtual water scarcity risk transfers of energy system in China, Journal of Environmental Economics and Policy Studies, Springer.
• Farnoosh A., Di Peng, et al., 2021. Study on the impacts of Shanghai Crude Oil Futures on global oil market and oil industry based on Error Correction Model and Directed Acyclic Graph, ENERGY, Elsevier.
• Huiying Y., Zhang Q., Farnoosh A., Xunzhang P., 2020. Analyzing market-based carbon leakage problem in Chinese Certified Emission Reduction projects, Journal of Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, Springer.
• A. Farnoosh and Y. Zhang, 2019. Analyzing the Dynamic Impact of Electricity Futures on Revenue and Risk of Renewable Energy in China, Energy Policy, Elsevier.
• Han S., Farnoosh A., Lin C., Zhang B., 2019. Projections and Recommendations for Energy Structure and Industrial Structure Development in China through 2030: A System Dynamics Model, Sustainability, MDPI.

Highlights of the Chair are also listed in the « Handbook of International Energy Economics », in the Chapter entitled « Economics of Power Generation » (Palgrave Macmillan; published in 2022).

IFP School also organizes conferences within the scope of the Chair:

• Assessing the possible future of Paris Agreement “a meta-modeling approach” (February 2019)

Prof. Alain Haurie (Univ. of Geneva, Switzerland; Univ. of Montréal, Canada)
Dr. Marc Vielle (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland)

• The transformation of the electricity sector and the role of intelligent distributed generation & storage (May 2019)

Dr. Fereidoon P. Sioshansi (CEO of Menlo Energy Economics and editor of EEnergy Informer Journal, USA).

Finally, some papers are shared/presented at conferences organized by:

• the International Association of Energy Economists (IAEE), Canada, June 2019
• the European Association of Energy Economists (EAEE), Slovenia, August 2019
• the Johns Hopkins Center - Workshop on « Electricity in Europe », Nanjing – China, November 2019.

Upcoming projects

• Organization of conferences and workshops;
• New papers and articles presented at international conferences;
• Development of training modules and projects regarding electricity and digitalization dedicated to our Master programs…
  
  

For more information, please contact: arash.farnoosh@ifpen.fr