We are hosting and supervising PhD student Daniele Mosso for one year. Daniele is completing his PhD at Politecnico di Torino, developing tools to model the water-energy-food nexus and answer a central question: to what extent can energy be produced without significantly harming natural resources and the sectors that depend on them.
Daniele’s early research identified land use, and the consumption of natural resources more broadly, as a major constraint on the sustainability of energy systems, and found that existing energy system optimisation models have real limitations when it comes to representing environmental and sustainability aspects.
Building on this, Daniele is developing a tool to represent the agriculture, forestry and land use (AFOLU) sectors within an energy system optimisation model, able to account for land and water consumption and the emissions associated with them. The work is in line with Energy Modelling Lab’s own project to build a prototype AFOLU module for the TIMES modelling framework. In the final part of his PhD, Daniele plans to explore a soft-linking methodology, including the possibility of coupling directly with an integrated assessment model that represents natural resources.
The research develops a prototype module representing the agriculture, forestry and land use sectors for the TIMES modelling framework, built under the IEA-ETSAP programme.
Scenarios test the impact of the AFOLU sector’s energy consumption, feeding into the wider development of a soft-linking methodology between the TIMES-based module and an integrated assessment model representing natural resources.
Daniele Mosso is a member of the MAHTEP Group (Modelling of Advanced Heat Transfer and Energy Problems) at Politecnico di Torino, and the research is part of a PhD to be completed in 2026.
Client: Not applicable (PhD supervision)
Reference: Not applicable
Collaborators: Politecnico di Torino (MAHTEP Group), Professor Laura Savoldi
EML team: Daniele Mosso, Ida Græsted Jensen
Budget: Not stated on the existing page
Duration: 2024 to 2025
Model: TIMES (AFOLU module)