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Getting published in an international journal, perspectives of Editors and Publisher
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Moderator: Mr. Adam Fraser
As researchers, you want to get publish to disseminate your ideas, to uncover potential research collaborations, to progress in your academic career and to secure research funding. This panel will offer insights into scholarly publishing and give advice for preparing manuscripts to give you the best chance of publishing in an international journal. The session is suitable for PhD and Post Docs students, as well as for researchers who have experience in the dissemination their research results.
The importance of authors to learn the specific aspects of the publishing cycle has become ever more crucial as the number of submissions, and as a consequence the number of rejections continues to rise. Taking on board the advice of leading journal editors by understanding the process and the expectations of editors when they receive your manuscript may help your manuscript stand out from crowd.
Peer-reviewed publications are a major product of present-day research. Beside conference presentations, teaching and industrial project implementation, they are one of the main outputs of research work. Many, mostly statistical, systems exist for expressing the influence of publication, such as Impact Factors (2- and 5-years), Total Cites, Immediacy Index, Cited Half-life, Eigenfactor®, Score, Article Influence® Score from Web of Knowledge, Web of Science, SRJ from SCOPUS, Elsevier and various h-indexes.
Related to this problem appeared a very interesting recent paper suggesting another indication: R-index (Logan 2014). The author suggests that the review process would be improved if we had reviewer metrics as well as author metrics. R-indices can be defined as the number of reviews, in which the author has provided over his/her academic career. Logan correctly stated that if it is possible to track total publications numbers and total citations, why not also track a total number of reviews?
There can be various R-indices: R-factor, the number of reviews that an author has provided over the author’s academic career, R 5 - over 5 years, R 2 - over two years and R 1—over a calendar or running year. However, Logan developed the idea even further: One peer-review publication requires typically three reviews. It means that for 10 publications, 30 reviews being needed, a representative R-index should be the number of reviews divided by the number of published papers. It is an appealing idea.
The panel will illustrate briefly the UNIPASpringer Initiative of co-branding between the Universoity of Palermo and Springer.
The UNIPA Springer Series publishes single and co-authored thematic collected volumes, monographs, handbooks and advanced textbooks, conference proceedings, professional books, SpringerBriefs, journals on specific issues of particular relevance in six core scientific areas. The issues may be interdisciplinary or within one specific area of interest.The first outcomes and main challenges will be outlined. The Editorial board composistion, the review proces as well as the benefits for young authors are presented. The issues may be interdisciplinary or within one specific area of interest. Manuscripts are invited for publication in the following fields of study:
Stepping up the penetration of renewables against infrastructural and financial barriers
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Moderator: Prof. Antonio Piacentino
After more than a decade of constant increase, in the last two years the penetration of renewable energy sources in the power market of several industrialized countries has slightly dampened. This trend has often coincided with the achievement of penetration rates in the order of 30-35%, and it is often interpreted as a consequence of a number of simultaneous factors.
Scarce flexibility of the power system, mainly related to insufficient capacity of local UHV and HV transmission grid and high inertia of a relevant share of conventional power generation units, is usually identified as a main barrier, due to the associated risks for grid stability. Peculiar features of each renewable technology, such as the well known “duck problem” for solar PV, also play a role, making the obstacles harder to overcome whenever a single intermittent source covers a large share of the renewable installed capacity.
These criticisms, however, have been already addressed and solved in several regions where extremely high penetration of renewables has been achieved. Also, focusing the attention only on these critical aspects risks to leave hidden some other arguments, related to the fluctuating impulse given by local support mechanisms for renewables and the competitive pressure exerted by companies operating conventional (and often highly efficient!) power plants and by importers and exporters of fossil fuels.
The panel is intended to represent a platform to share views and discuss strategies to speed up the penetration of renewables where stalemating.
The integration of variable renewable energy sources into energy systems is connected to the system flexibility as it is necessary to ensure balancing between demand and supply. There are four main sources of flexibility in current power systems, flexibility in generation units, electricity storage, interconnections and demand side management. Every of these flexibility sources has technical and market potential in particular area. With increasing number of installations of renewable energy sources it become obvious that there are periods with higher and lower demands for flexibility and the size of integration area plays the crucial role if the right infrastructure is in the place. Unlocking the flexibility potential must be prioritised by policy makers and all stakeholders if large scale integration of variable energy sources is expected. Overview of different approaches for unlocking the flexibility will be presented and discussed.
The high penetration of renewables on the power network comes at a cost of increasing flexibility. Flexibility on the production and consumption side, flexibility in the transfer of energy (power network), but also in the storage systems, and on the energy market. The set of measures to trigger is thus multiple and the combinations of these measures will influence the different transmission networks. While the amount of RES increases on the network, the primary challenge will come on the scarcity of the resources to produce energy: we first harvest resources where they are the most efficient (whether it is wind, solar, or biomass), and then it goes down the list of choices etc… This implies a high understanding of the spatial and resources limitations that is specific to each State. Generation flexibility implies faster response to levelize the production and the consumption patterns. Critical choices in technology able to respond the fastest will be privileged and carbon-based power plants will have to carefully select their energy source. Increasing ramping frequency will affect the emissions from these powerplants. One of the solutions to mitigate impacts of ramping are storage technologies. Storage is to answer particular and temporal need that has to be defined in the design phase. Influencing the consumption side is usually done through demand side management, whether it is a willingly contribution or not. Market mechanisms will contribute to unleash the potential of demand side management through generalising real time pricing. With the increasing amount of smart buildings and home automation systems, these market mechanisms may need to evolve to avoid non desired effect of massive shifting of energy usage. Down the line are the users and their involvement will also be crucial to affect the demand side of the equation.
While RES contributes to a decrease of the environmental impact (especially GHG emissions) and to an increase in self-sustainability of national energy systems, many aspects of the power system are affected by the increased share of such sources. The power systems must provide substantial reserves in conventional sources or significant capacity of electricity storage, since there are large fluctuations in production (for example at 22.9.2018 wind share in EU was 20.4% - max. in Denmark 104% but on 6.9.2018 just 4.4% - max. in Spain 11%) and intermittent electricity generation of renewable sources.
As we are facing increasing penetration of RES into the grid, energy storage technologies can provide additional flexibility for the power system, which is needed to better balance between production and consumption of electricity. The need for energy storage technologies derives from the basic characteristics of electricity; that in each moment consumption and production of electricity should be the same.
In addition, with a high percentage of penetration of wind and PV in some regions, there is excess energy, which is actually cost-free. This surplus could be stored in energy storage technologies such as EVs or pumped storage HPPs and used later on and thus also reduce production costs.
Costs of wind and PV integration are divided into three groups: Direct costs, System costs, Macroeconomic impact. Direct costs represent the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE), i.e. they consist of the costs of construction and financing costs, FO&M, VO&M. System costs represent additional costs incurred by connecting the production unit to the network and consist of balancing costs, network costs (upgrading/construction of the grid, transmission losses, congestions etc.), and integration costs (needed reserve). The macroeconomic impact is related to the effects of the GDP and social welfare and avoided CO2 allowances costs, the unemployment rate and the distribution of damage or benefits within individual sectors. Given the significant expansion of RES over the last few years, an analysis at the level of the overall economy is crucially important, since the spread of certain technologies can lead to unexpected consequences for other economic entities and sectors.
How to optimize these 3 types of cost will be discussed.
