Italy Energyscope: energy system modeling and scenarios for the Italian energy transition

Sustainability of national energy systems has a strategic role in current and future energy-environmental policies as it involves key points such as security and continuity of energy supply, mitigation of environmental impact (with special focus on climate-changing emissions) and energy affordability. In this context, modeling tools able to represent a simplified yet detailed configuration of national energy systems become more and more important. These energy models can support the decision-making process towards the so-called energy transition at different stages and spatial scales by producing reliable trajectories of the energy system in a certain time horizon, coherent with given hypothesis and constraints. However, widely used energy models are often neither fully accessible nor usable, making difficult critically examining the results available on literature. Thus, through this work of Thesis, we want to present the application of the open-source energy model called Energyscope TD to the Italian case-study in order to identify multiple low-carbon scenarios up to 2030 and beyond, during the so-called energy transition. Firstly, the structure and formulation of the linear programming (LP) model is briefly presented and described. With respect to previous works adopting this modeling framework, the proposed solution, called Italy Energyscope, has a higher level of details by adding new parameters and constraints. Furthermore, since the Italian energy system is highly heterogeneous, Italy Energyscope is able to take into account energy demands, availability of resources and weather conditions regionally. Secondly, in order to test the accuracy of the model, Italy Energyscope is validated on the Italian energy system in the year 2015. This choice is due to the availability of precise data for the aforementioned year, fully documented and reported. Once demonstrated the reliability of the model and the accuracy of the results, different scenarios of energy transition for the year 2030 are defined. Considering uncertainties and challenges characterizing large-scale energy system, the analysis of multiple scenarios can in fact help identifying solid options towards decarbonised configurations, both in terms of technical and economic feasibility. In particular, the analysis shows if current policies and trends of development can guarantee to meet national and European energy and environmental targets, and which could be alternative pathways towards a deeper decarbonisation. Finally, three major results are obtained: (i) business as usual scenarios do not meet the goals for 2030, (ii) the recent national directive called ``NES 2017" defines an affordable path to meet the 40\% emission reduction target with respect to 1990, (iii) the Italian theoretical maximum decarbonisation potential is quantifiable in a 97\% reduction of carbon dioxide emissions with respect to 1990, and could be met through huge investments in electrifying the different end-use energy demands by using electric vehicles, heat pumps and by developing both renewables and Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technologies.