ESC News

A special issue on modelling climate policy in Switzerland has been published in the Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics. Under the umbrella of the Swiss Energy Modelling Platform (SEMP), five modelling teams have contributed to assessing the economic and technological consequences of reaching Swiss emission targets up to 2050.

With the recent changes in energy-production technology and with the extensive penetration of renewables into distribution networks, the power system models are again under close evaluation. In this project we study to what extent power electronics can replace rotating machines on a large scale and look into ways the energy transition could be performed seamlessly.

The Joint Activity Scenarios & Modelling (JASM) bundles the knowledge of all eight Swiss Competence Centers for Energy Research (SCCER) to generate scenarios, evaluating how Switzerland can substantially reduce its CO2 emissions in the energy sector.

Bounded rationality is an important behavioral failure responsible for the energy-efficiency gap, whereby consumers underinvest in energy-efficient technologies. One means of addressing this is by improving the energy-related financial literacy of households, defined as the combination of energy knowledge and cognitive abilities needed in order for decision-makers to make sound choices with respect to investment in durables.

Reliable and affordable energy supply is the backbone of today’s societies. It comes at a cost, though: Emissions into air, water and soil pollute the environment and cause diseases among humans. For balancing benefits and drawbacks of modern power generation globally, the Ecological Systems Design group at ETH Zürich develops new assessment approaches that combine the large amounts of available data and fill the gaps.

Data centers, which are key elements of the worldwide information processing and communication infrastructure are estimated to consume 300 TWh annually, which equals a continuous dissipation of 34 GW. Accordingly, DC power distribution systems with a bus voltage of 400 V are introduced in next generation datacenters to provide significant improvements in terms of efficiency, reliability and cost.  

Within the context of different energy transition pathways for the city of St. Gallen, Switzerland, the Laboratory for Energy Conversion is conducting holistic assessments that account for different technological, economic, societal, and political drivers.

The increasing number of high-power DC applications such as data centers or electric vehicle charging facilities demand for highly efficient and highly compact Medium-Voltage (MV) connected DC power supplies. Novel 10kV SiC power semiconductors enable the realization of Solid-State Transformers (SSTs) featuring a supreme efficiency and power density compared to conventional MV-AC-to-400V-DC solutions.

Within an ERC starting grant award on the topic of “Smart Monitoring, Inspection and Life-Cycle Assessment of Wind Turbines”, the chair of structural mechanics is leading a comprehensive measurement campaign on a field wind turbine in Winterthur, Switzerland.

Hydro-abrasive turbine wear caused by sediments in the water has negative effects on hydroelectric power generation. Desanding facilities are adequate countermeasures, but often do not meet the design requirements. An improved design concept was developed using both numerical simulations and field experiments to limit scale effects with fine sediment modelling.

A/S Research Group develops a thermally active building system for a vaulted floor element that allows to harness energy from low temperature sources while at the same time ensuring thermal comfort of the occupants.

Many future electricity scenarios, including those developed for the Swiss Federal Office of Energy (SFOE), use natural gas to bridge the transition to renewables. But such scenarios are inconsistent with the need to completely decarbonize energy supply. This study examines whether natural gas is indeed necessary or useful.

Grid-scale storage of electricity is vital in energy scenarios with a high share of renewable electricity generation, such as wind and solar power. Redox flow batteries are particularly suited for intra-day time-shifting storage applications, yet investment costs need to be lowered for economic viability of the technology.

In 2017, the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB CFF FFS) launched the SBB Green Class project, a one-year pilot study in which 140 participants across Switzerland were offered a comprehensive Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) package, containing (among others) a general public transport pass valid in the entire country (GA) and an electric car (BMW i3).

While overhead-line electricity transmission grids are generally well established in Europe, and there is not a big incentive to install new or replace existing conductors, there is a high interest in improving reliability and maximising current flow with minimum impact on operating lifetime. This is the focus of the CONFAT project.

Hydraulic turbines are eroded by sediment-laden high-speed flow. Turbine erosion has negative effects on the cost of electricity production and on the energy efficiency. To mitigate these negative effects, the sediment load, turbine erosion and efficiency were monitored in a case study and a prediction model was calibrated.

Todays modern smartphones are not only widely used, but also often equipped with GPS receivers and other sensors to allow constant monitoring of their users’ locations and in some cases even recognition of their activities. For this reason, these mobile devices are of particular interest for transport and mobility, where detailed movement data are needed for urban planning, smart city-related activities, and behavior change.

Public policy plays an important role in incentivizing a transition of the energy sector towards technologies with low greenhouse gas emissions. However, measuring policy is not easy – especially as policy instruments interact in policy mixes. ETH Zurich’s Energy Politics Group (EPG) has developed a new method of measuring policy content and built a database to analyze the energy policy mixes of various OECD and non-OECD countries.

A higher adoption rate of energy-efficient appliances is expected to contribute towards improvement in energy efficiency within the residential sector. In this study, we explore the possibility that an improvement of the consumers’ energy-related investment literacy increases the probability that households identify the most cost-effective appliance.

Synthetic liquid fuels are ideal vectors for the distribution and storage of sustainable energy, allowing the exploitation of the actual infrastructure for fossil hydrocarbons. Such chemical energy carriers can be synthesised from recycled CO₂ and H₂ produced from intermittent renewable electrical power provided robust catalysts are developed.

A recent publication of the CAPS laboratory studies the complex dynamics of a lab-scale combustor subject to thermoacoustic instability. This phenomenon is a recurrent issue in constant pressure combustor -such as gas turbines, aeronautical engines or rockets- which can lead to catastrophic failures of the combustion system. This instability can arise suddenly, if the operating condition of the machine is varied.

Melt water from glaciers makes a significant contribution to the overall discharge of Swiss rivers, especially during hot and dry summers. Consequently, the reduction of the ice volume in the Alps due to the ongoing melting of glaciers will have a strong impact on many fields including the electricity production from hydropower. For predicting the future discharge of rivers, a good knowledge of today’s ice volumes and the topography of the underlying bedrock is crucial.

Run-of-river hydropower plants can supply much needed flexibility to the power system. As wind turbines and solar panels supplant nuclear, coal, and natural gas generation, the flexibility from run-of-river hydropower can help keep the electricity grid balanced, stable, and secure.

Traditionally, most high-voltage insulation systems in electrical power transmission applications are stressed with DC or 50 Hz AC voltage. This article provides a short summary on the challenges associated with high-voltage insulation system design for applications with non-conventional waveforms occurring in medium-voltage converters or inverter-fed loads.

Choice defaults have become an increasingly popular and seemingly inexpensive public policy tool. Yet, there is scant knowledge on the distributional consequences of such nudges for different groups in society. A field study with a Swiss utility provides novel empirical findings highlighting the need for a careful evaluation of choice defaults.

The property of an AC power network to return to a stable equilibrium point and synchronism after a disturbance is known as rotor-angle stability or transient stability. Maintaining transient stability becomes increasingly challenging due to the growing share of non-synchronous converterbased generation from renewables in the power network.

The team Swissloop, formed by 40 ETH students, achieved the remarkable 3rd place in 2017-finals of the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition. In order to provide a scientific foundation and further improvements of a magnetically levitated “Hyperloop” vehicle (pod), a research project has been conducted at the Power Electronic Systems Laboratory.

The Center for Security Studies (CSS) has just published a CSS Policy Analysis on the political and security effects of recent changes in the global oil market. Two trends seem to dominate the debate: The emergence of “peak demand” and an apparent investment gap in the oil sector.

A new rechargeable aluminum chloride-graphite battery was designed using processed natural graphite flakes in its cathode. The major performance metrics – energy density (up to 62 Wh kg^-1), power density (500-1000 W kg^-1), energy efficiency (90%) and long cycling life (>5000 cycles without capacity loss) – are ideal for grid-level stationary energy storage.

The Research Centre for Energy Networks (ETH Zurich) in collaboration with the Research Center for Sustainable Energy and Water Supply (FoNEW, University of Basel) recently published the results of a study on the System Adequacy the Swiss electricity sector. The aim of the study was to develop a comprehensive concept for the evaluation of security of supply over all relevant time periods, which take into account the strategic decisions of federal policy.

The roll-out of Smart Meters in electric distribution grids allows grid operators to attain grid transparency, i.e. detailed visibility of the status of their grid infrastructure. Artificial neural networks are trained on Smart Meter data in order to provide highly localised yet accurate short-term predictions of both electricity consumption and photovoltaic production patterns.

Remote sensors and actuators are gaining in importance for the Internet of Things (IoT) and energy harvesting could power these systems directly at the location of consumption. In distributed systems or in harsh environments, e.g. sensors/actuators on a freight train car, this allows improving reliability and efficiency, while decreasing costs.

Climate change leads to glacier retreat in the Swiss Alps. New potential locations for HPP reservoirs become ice-free, and additional meltwater from glaciers may be available for production. Seven potential future site would have enough technical potential to achieve the interim goal of Energy Strategy 2050 concerning electricity supply.

Owners, operators and manufacturers of wind turbines (WTs) spend significant resources on discovering root causes of faults in components on WTs. The Chair of Structural Mechanics is developing a software-hardware solution for the smart monitoring of WTs, which is based on data fusion and self-training capabilities. 

Gas and electric networks are characterized by strong interdependencies, which occur at the level of gas-fired power plants and electric compressors. Due to the increasing exploitations of gas as energy resource to balance fluctuating renewables, the operations of these infrastructures are increasingly coupled. Therefore, combined gas and electric analysis becomes necessary.