- 06 Feb 2020 » Melvyn defends his PhD thesis
Following the oral exam which he passed with flying colors in December 2019, Melvyn will publicly defend his PhD thesis on “Local Vulnerabilities and Global Robustness of Coupled Dynamical Systems on Complex Networks” on Thursday 6th February 2020 at 16:00 at EPFL-Valais. The outcome is not officially known and will...
- 24 Jan 2020 » Geometry of Complex Webs
Robin is co-organizing a workshop on the “Geometry of Complex Webs”. Very interesting idea as this is not your usual meeting. Instead it intends to bring together people from very diverse backgrounds and interests, that have in common to be related to networks/graphs - a.k.a. “webs” - and in particular...
- 23 Jan 2020 » PanTaGruEl - Open Access model of the European transmission grid
PanTaGruEl, our new Open Access, dynamical model of the synchronous grid of Continental Europe is up and running and available online !
- 27 Nov 2019 » New Paper in Science Advances
It took us a long time to get this published. And we could have good reasons to be frustrated at how that manuscript was editorially handled until it got published. But then it was well worth the effort and the patience : our theory identifying the most vulnerable components in...
- 07 Oct 2019 » New Partnership with Swissgrid
We recently started a research project funded by Swissgrid, Switzerland’s electric transport system’s operator. They generously offered to fund the research activities of our colleague Koen van Walstijn, towards his PhD degree. We are thrilled at starting this partnership - it is not every day that a private partner offers...
- 07 Oct 2019 » Visit of Simonetta Sommaruga
I had the great chance and pleasure to meet with federal councillor Simonetta Sommaruga. She came and made a visit to Sion and stopped by our institute to talk about energy. She is a very smart person genuinely interested in collecting people’s opinion to get a better picture of the...
- 07 Aug 2019 » The 3 pillars of sustainability
Don’t you find it curious that when people say “sustainability” or “renewables” they seem to mean the same thing ? Which, by the way likely indicates that they don’t know the meaning of either words. Well, sustainable means that something is economically, environmentally and socially acceptable - that it does...
- 30 Oct 2018 » Best Presentation Award
Congratulations to Melvyn who wins the best presentation award at the International School on Informatics and Dynamics in Complex Networks at the University of Catania.
- 18 Oct 2018 » Joint appointment with the department of quantum matter physics
Great news as I have an official joint appointment with the department of quantum matter physics at the University of Geneva.
- 03 Oct 2018 » 2nd International Conference on Future Electric Power Systems
The school of engineering at the U of Applied Sciences of Western Switzerland is organizing, again (!) an international conference on electric power systems. Again (!) it will take place in Champéry, and again (!) in February - this time 2019 - why change a winning formula ? The 2017...
- 09 Aug 2018 » Special issue of the New York Times Magazine
The August 5th edition of the New York Times Magazine has been fully dedicated to climate changes. More precisely, how we could have averted it altogether. Nathaniel Rich investigated actions taken by visionary scientists and aids to policymakers in the decade 1979-1989. The science of climate change/greenhouse warming was known...
- 14 Jun 2018 » Our physico-economical model for the future of the pan-European electric sector
The paradox of the energy transition is that the low marginal costs of new renewable energy sources drag electricity prices down. Doing so, they discourage investments in flexible productions that are needed to compensate for the lack of dispatchability of the new RES. The energy transition thus discourages the investments...
- 13 Jun 2018 » The last nail in the climatoskeptical coffin
I have been a firm believer for a number of years now that current climate changes (a.k.a global warming) are dominantly man-made. Yet there was always this small “detail” that bothered me - while there is no possible doubt that the north polar icecap is steadily losing ground, the situation...
- 29 May 2018 » Robin defends his PhD thesis with flying colors!
Robin has successfully defended his PhD thesis “Loop flows in the Kuramoto model” in mathematics at the University of Geneva. The thesis is full of interesting, new results related to synchrony, how it may occur, in how many forms it can exist in a given system and how many of...
- 14 May 2018 » Arctic Sea Ice Missed a Record Low This Winter. Barely.
There is some good news and some bad news here. On March 23, the New York Times announced that there was more arctic sea ice in 2018 than in 2017 - to be more precise, the maximum amount of sea ice in 2018 was above the maximum of 2017, but...
- 09 May 2018 » Global Warming is Man-Made
I recently was interviewed by our local newspaper “Le Nouvelliste” about global warming. This was a follow-up article on a piece where Jean-Claude Pont, science historian of self-proclaimed scientific expertise, negated the anthropological origin of current climatological changes. Why bother now ? After all, climatoskeptical views have been expressed long...
- 19 Apr 2018 » Site is online
After months of hard work, we now have an operating site online. V1.0 is live and we’ll keep improving and updating the site as we go.
