Femke Nijsse

I'm a complexity scientist with experience modelling climate, energy systems and the economy.

I'm working on innovation in the energy system and the transition towards sustainable energy. I have been involved in the EEIST project led previously by Jean-Francois Mercure. The project seeks to inform energy policy in China, Brazil and India, as well as the UK and the EU. As part of this project, I've improved the representation of the power sector in the energy-economy-environment model E3ME-FTT. Major energy technologies in E3ME-FTT are represented with evolutionary economics, so that the diffusion of a new technology follows an S-curve. I've improved the power sector model by improving the representation of learning, getting higher-quality data and improve the representation of energy storage.

As a next step, I'm involved in developing a submodel of E3ME-FTT for flexibility, storage and hydrogen to gain a better understanding of the diffusion of high shares of variable renewables, and the way sector coupling can help. This should inform what type of policies are effective now that the major barriers towards diffusion are changing (supply chain / grid stability rather than costs)

I did my PhD within mathematics in the Exeter Climate Systems group with Peter Cox. It involved finding a theoretical basis for emergent constraints and improving (statistical) techniques. For some processes, a group of climate models shows a relationship between a past and future variable. Measurements of the first allows us to exploit this relationship and get a better estimate of our future climate. My focus was on decadal variability, historical warming and climate sensitivity.