Natural gas crisis: How quickly can we restore energy security and does the crisis promote or hinder the path to climate neutrality?
Moderator: Prof. Ingo Stadler
Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent disruptions in the supply of natural gas to Europe have severely shaken Europe's self-conception of its energy security.
We would like to discuss with participants from different European countries what impact the crisis has had and may have on the security of supply. We would like to discuss how we can restore energy security in Europe as quickly as possible.
Furthermore, we would like to critically question the reaction of Europe and its member countries with regard to how the gas crisis influences the climate crisis. Is the gas crisis a push to tackle the climate crisis or are we falling back into old ways of thinking?
In Denmark as well as in many other European nations, public, political and institutional memory is too short. The Suez crisis, the Yum Kippur war, The Iranian revolution where all events outside of Europe that impacted prices or trust in energy supplies – but they all seem to have disappeared from current awareness and has little impact on Danish and European energy policy and planning. In Denmark, actions taken after the oil crises, however, still have a positive impact on the resilience of the energy system. Oil and gas exploration in the North Sea has made Denmark self-sufficient with these fossil sources – albeit not momentarily due to a current redevelopment of the Tyra gas field. A strong focus on district heating and later climate-change-mitigation induced wind power, PV and biogas developments have also helped make the Danish energy system robust, and today about 30 of the gas demand is e.g. covered by locally produced biogas. Yet there are also flipsides to the coin. More than 400,000 homes are heated using gas, the market construction has resulted in a multiplication of electricity prices despite low-marginal cost wind and PV power, and the Danish Government persists with the construction of a new gas pipe line. The natural gas-heated homes form a particular focus area fort both planning and policy-making in the current Danish context.
While finding alternative supply of fossil gas is priority for next two years, it is time to understand that using gas for low temperature heating is thermodynamic nonsense, while being a critical issue for security of energy supply. The problem is that whole power and industrial sectors will usually be able to use alternative fuels, while households will rarely have multiple heating systems. Also, burning gas for low temperature heating is destroying exergy. Using gas in cogeneration coupled with district heating and heat pumps can deliver 4 times more low temperature heat than gas boilers. All gas network connections to new and retrofitted buildings should be banned, and cities should be zones for replacing gas networks with district heating networks, or in case of low density of heat demand, with heat pumps. Also, public should be prepared for ban o sales of gas boilers and end of life of existing systems. Burning hydrogen in gas boilers does not make sense from economic, environmental, security of supply or thermodynamic point of view.
Chile has also been affected by the current energy crisis. However, similar contexts affected Chile in a first energy crisis decades ago. In the 80s and 90s, Chilean energy mix was highly dependent on hydro-based energy, being vulnerable to climate conditions. If fact, droughts and dry years, along with low natural gas prices from Argentina, created incentives to invest in several natural gas power plants. In this context, Chile had a highly concentrated electricity mix (gas and hydro) and a lack of energy independence. This resulted in a second energy crisis after Argentina announced in 2004 a reduction of exports to Chile and a complete termination in 2008. Under this context, instead of shifting towards renewables, Chile remained dependent on natural gas imports (LNG) from USA and Asia and invested in several MWs of coal-based power plants. Such decisions are being questioned now, due to current international commitments. Chile has announced a coal-phased out strategy towards Carbon Neutrality. By today, Chile has phased out 30% of the existing power plants, it is expected to phase out 50% by 2024, and there are further efforts to phase out 100% of coal power plants by 2030. This translates to significant economic losses and stranded assets; however, it has also significantly accelerated the development of renewable energy sources as well as green hydrogen strategies. In Chile, questions remain regarding the choice of not decarbonizing the energy system in the 2000s and reducing the energy dependence of international fossil fuels, questions that should guide countries currently facing natural gas energy dependence. It is maybe the opportunity to shift towards larger investments of renewable sources as well as green hydrogen.
How to succeed in scientific publishing
Moderator: Dr. Dana Niculescu
Publish or perish is a crucial rule of life in researchers’ carriers, both for PhD students and for senior researchers searching for research funding. It may be especially difficult to publish one’s first paper in a leading journal, since besides having some really exciting research results, the writer must also know how to present it properly, while also taking into account the research community around that particular journal.
Often submissions get rejected only because a proper literature review is missing, or if the methodology and results are mixed throughout the paper, not allowing for the methodology to be reused for other similar case studies. Authors often only cite those references that have been used to reach the results, but forget to cite all the other similar work, especially in the immediate topic of research, which will show that their results are truly a new contribution.
The panel made of Editors-in-Chief of leading partner journals of the SDEWES Conference will aim to highlight what are the most important things that authors should take into account when submitting their papers to journals.
Publication is the key means for the dissemination of science and the evaluation by journal editors and peer reviewers is an important part of the scientific process. As Senior Editor for Energy Reports, Elsevier, I take the opportunity of this invitation to share my recommendations on how to choose the right journal for publishing research outcomes. The speech is epsecially intended for doctoral students and other young scholars and it aims at highlighting, from the point of view of editors, the main criteria to follow when selecting the journal. Although the journal selection is the first step of the publication process, it is often underestimated by the authors. In this regard, to make sure that your research and novel findings reach the target audience and make an impact on the research community, selecting the proper journal is crucial. Authors should follow some basic rules for selecting the most suitable journal among the available portfolio of journals in their target research area, such as: paying attention to the publisher reputation and carefully evaluating the aim and readership. In this regard, I will suggest and show you how to conduct the journal selection and how to use some tools, provided by publishers, to succeed in publishing your reserach, improve the chances of having your manuscript sent out for peer review and finally accepted for publishing, and, most importantly, reaching your target audience.
As Editor in Chief for Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments, I will participate on this panel to explain what we look for as editors in scientific papers and also how to ethically publish scientific research. Scientific manuscripts must report on novel work and findings that break into new ground and bring new knowledge to the field – this is often not the case and quite a few manuscripts are reporting on – what we call – incremental advances in research. Manuscripts must be ethically addressing a specific topic, ethically conducting the research and ethically reporting it, with full respect to the history of scientific development in the subject field and in an unbiased manner, cite all the relevant literature and prior art. Scientific manuscripts must be succinct and written in a language that the specialist will be able to replicate the work in order to build on and at the same time, the non-initiated can understand the main message being conveyed; scientific articles, reporting on fundamental research are *not* full dissertations, tens of thousands of words in length, containing peripheral information that distracts the reader from the narrative flow. Ethical research not only means complying with the local practice and governance, but also reporting the work in a professionally responsible manner.
This presentation is about problems related to abnormal and scientifically wrong behaviour of authors and reviewers. Plagiarism is explained and in particular the type of sources that can be used and may constitute plagiarism are given. Examples of similarity reports are then given and details of what the editors are looking for in these reports are explained.
This presentation concludes by giving details about self-plagiarism and some other ethical problems, like authorship problems, salami publishing, double submissions and copying just tables and figures, are explained. Finally, problems related to the review process and ethically wrong behaviour of the reviewers are explained.
This short presentation address how and why to write a good scientific paper. How does the process look from the perspective of the editors? What are the editors looking for in a submission? How should authors and potential new authors structure their paper? What do you need to do in order to get your paper published? And what should one avoid doing?
In my capacity of Associate Editor of two Elsevier’s journals - Energy Reports and Smart Energy I will highlight what the reviewers are looking at when evaluating a paper, as well as provide guidance to authors on how to respond to the reviewers’ comments. The topics covered will include: Structure and informativeness of the abstract, justification of the research question, contributions and novelty, suitability of the approach and methods, presentation of results and implications, as well as adequacy of the title and highlights, language, writing style, clarity and the overall structure of the paper. Point-by-point answers with sufficient level of detail and clear linkage to the revisions made assure positive evaluation of the revised manuscript and final acceptance.
