A LITTLE BIT OF TERNA IN AMERICA

Some opportunities come around only once in a lifetime, and can lead to important experiences for personal and professional growth.

Federico Quaglia is a young energy engineer whose field of expertise is dispatching: grid and adequacy analyses, capacity market design and the definition of market zones. He is currently the head of a new unit which handles energy operation analyses and studies. Federico is also Terna’s first Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, California, U.S.A.

This experience has been made possible thanks to a five-year partnership with the US school which allows selected employees to attend courses on the campus of the Californian university for an entire semester and actively contribute to the Sponsored Research Collaboration (Terna’s focused research project, managed in collaboration with the university). We had the chance to speak with him directly...

Federico, what type of project are you involved in at Stanford University?

The aim of the project is to compare Italian market design, which, like all of Europe, has a largely zone-based approach, with market design in the US and Canada, which makes particular use of a nodal model. I have the opportunity to attend courses in addition to the project, two in particular: one on the preparation of tenders, negotiation and pricing mechanisms, the other on machine learning techniques. I can also attend all seminars related to the topic of energy (there are at least one or two each week).

How do you think your studies will be helpful for Terna’s operations?

As an example, Terna is beginning to explore machine learning techniques in order to understand the advantages of applying these techniques to a range of projects. I thought that it would be useful for me and for Terna to have somebody inside the company with the professional skills to handle those issues. In terms of the course on preparing tenders (offered at the Graduate Business School), I chose it because I have been working in the capacity market for a few years now, and in that context I have been able to contribute to the design of a new market which involves tenders. As an energy engineer rather than an economist, I thought that it might be useful for the future to study the existing mechanisms, the advantages and disadvantages, and when it is better to employ certain types of negotiation or pricing mechanisms. The course is very advanced and I devote a lot of time to studying at the weekends to close the knowledge gap between myself and the other students, who have all studied economics.

An international environment like Stanford must be very stimulating, both in terms of the people and the professions that you encounter...

Yes, it’s a really fantastic environment. There are lots of opportunities to meet people and discuss interesting topics. In the Bits and Watts program, for example, a meeting is organised every two weeks where somebody presents work they have done in the past, and given that it is quite a wide-ranging project you can meet people from very different backgrounds.

Thanks for your time Federico, and good luck with the experience!

Thank you!