PEOPLEGrazia Barchi

de en it

Grazia Barchi

Senior Researcher
Institute for Renewable Energy

T +39 0471 055 628

grazia.barchi@eurac.edu

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7143-7002

download or scan my contact information (vCard Format)

About

Dr Grazia Barchi is a Senior Researcher and leader of the Grid Integration team at the Institute for Renewable Energy, Eurac Research, in Bolzano, Italy. She holds a PhD in Information and Communication Technology from the University of Trento, with research focused on algorithms for synchrophasors and grid state estimation.

Her work focuses on the planning and operation of electricity grids with high shares of distributed energy resources, including PV, battery energy storage systems, renewable energy communities, flexibility and ancillary services, and the application of state estimation and signal processing to electrical measurements.

Dr. Barchi has authored or co-authored more than 50 scientific papers. She serves on the technical committees of international conferences in photovoltaics and electrical engineering and is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement. She is also a member of the Governing Board of ETIP SNET and of the Steering Committee of ETIP-PV, where she contributed to the European research and innovation strategies in smart energy networks and Photovoltaics.

Links to external profiles:

Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=51Vd7UoAAAAJ&hl=it

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grazia-barchi/

Scientific Publications

Journal article2026

A pathway for firm and dispatchable solar/wind supply through generation and markets splitting

Pierro M, Cornaro C, Moser D, Perez R, Remund J, Barchi G

Grazia Barchi, Marco Pierro

Project: EU H2020 TRUST-PV: Increase Friendly Integration of Reliable PV plants considering different market segments, EU HE SUPERNOVA

The current mainstream strategy to allow a high share of variable renewable energy feed-in is mainly aimed at enabling new flexibility resources, but at high penetration, these resources are unlikely to be sufficient. On the contrary, the firmness and dispatchability of solar/wind could reduce/eliminate any demand for additional flexibility. In this work, we showed that solar/wind facilities can produce both variable/intermittent and baseload/dispatchable 24/365 energy by installing battery energy storage, grid forming inverters and suitable power plant controller. Then, we propose a new market design more suitable for this generation splitting approach. Using Italy as a case study, we have shown through energy simulations and cost optimization/analysis that the proposed market reform, combined with a firm energy feed-in tariff (always below 100 €/MWh), would make it profitable to reduce variable energy feed-in from large PV/wind power plants and related induced flexibility requirements by 20 %–30 %–40 %, in 2024–2030–2050. This flexibility reduction increases to 50 %–60 %–70 % dealing with the joint generation of an optimal mix of PV/wind farms. In addition, in 2050, for PV and the optimal mix of solar/wind systems, incentives below 100 €/MWh will push producers to generate only dispatchable energy. We also showed that our approach could solve or mitigate the significant misalignments between the current market structure and the techno-economic characteristics of renewables: wholesale market price volatility and cannibalization, growth of balancing prices and system-charges required to increase grid hosting capacity and adequacy.

DOI Source

DOI: 10.1016/j.enconman.2025.120662

Journal article2026

An advanced predictive battery control strategy for plus energy building flexibility: Simulation-based assessment and laboratory experimental setup

Dalla Maria E, Turrin F, Belleri A, Barchi G

Grazia Barchi, Annamaria Belleri, Francesco Turrin, Enrico Dalla Maria

Project: EU H2020 CULTURAL-E: Climate and cultural based design and market valuable technology solutions for Plus Energy Houses

Buildings account for 40% of energy use making them central to achieving climate neutrality goals. In this context, energy building flexibility emerges as a key enabler, particularly when combined with the Plus Energy Building (PEB) concept, where buildings generate more renewable energy than they consume annually to achieve climate-neutrality goals. As an energy system, the building can offer demand-side flexibility by responding to external penalty signals such as price, CO₂ emissions or grid congestion, thus enabling system operators to dynamically influence consumption patterns. In this work, we present a predictive advanced PV-battery management strategy in year-long simulations across different scenarios, obtained by combining a reference building archetype, various representative European geo-clusters, and electrical consumption resulting from tailored controls of the thermal assets. The heterogeneous results across geo-clusters underscore the influence of climate, culture, and system sizing on predictive control performance, with findings from the Mediterranean cluster (with expected best case flexibility improvement in the range of 14%). These outcomes motivate the implementation of a laboratory-scale setup to port the proposed control strategies to commercially available devices under real working conditions. We report observations of a year-long monitoring of such a laboratory setup, recording the ability to shift battery stored energy toward high-priced periods, with non-standard induced inverter operations observed 10% of the time, highlighting the system’s responsiveness under real-world conditions.

DOI Source

DOI: 10.1016/j.segan.2026.102127

Journal article2025

Advancing renewable energy community planning through integrated sector-coupling and economies of scale

Casalicchio V, Barchi G, Calabria F, Manzolini G, Prina MG, Moser D

Grazia Barchi, Matteo Prina, Valeria Casalicchio

Project: EU FESR V2G-BOOST - developing and expanding Vehicle-to-Grid decarBOnization Option for advanced energy innovation in South Tyrol

As the world transitions towards renewable energy sources, optimizing energy sharing within communities has emerged as a key strategy for sustainability and cost-efficiency. In this paper, we present a comprehensive simulation model designed to optimize energy sharing among households and municipal buildings within a renewable energy community setting. Our model integrates various energy sectors, including electricity, heating, cooling, domestic hot water, and transportation, using a bottom-up approach and linear programming. Drawing upon existing frameworks and methodologies, we conduct a case study in a hypothetical small Italian community to demonstrate the potential of our simulation model in promoting energy efficiency and sustainability. We analyze the economic and environmental impacts of different energy optimization strategies in various scenarios, including sector coupling and collaborative energy sharing. Our findings reveal that integrating various energy demands and utilizing economies of scale in energy communities can lead to significant bill savings. With sector coupling alone, savings exceed 35 %, while combining sector coupling with energy sharing results in over 43 % savings, achieved without significantly increasing installed capacity, but with a more efficient distribution, which also reduces the total investment cost by around 32 % due to economies of scale.

DOI Source

DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2025.125942

Journal article2025

Centralised vehicle-to-grid smart charging supported by PV generation for power variance minimisation at the transformer: A user’s perspective analysis

Secchi M, Macii D, Barchi G, Marinelli M

Grazia Barchi

Recent studies show that the electric vehicle (EV) fleet in the EU will reach 37–38 million units by 2035. Most of them are expected to be charged at home, boosting the number of residential charging stations to be installed. In order to decrease their environmental impact, these stations should be powered by clean energy sources, such as distributed photovoltaic (PV) generators. However, the increased penetration of EVs and PVs may cause large power supply and demand fluctuations, stressing the substation transformers. This paper proposes a centralised bidirectional Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) smart EV charging policy minimising the net-load power variance (NLV) at the transformer. The proposed approach relies on the iterative solution of a Mixed-Integer Quadratically-Constrained Quadratic Programming (MIQCQP) problem that, unlike other research papers, keeps into account users’ charging/discharging requirements, and realistic charging limitations and efficiency. The impact of the resulting EV charging schedules is analysed at a district level for growing EV and PV penetration values, then compared with the results obtained with both unidirectional (V1G) and uncontrolled (UC) EV charging. Key elements of novelty of the work are: (i) the formalisation of the optimisation problem and its scalability potential, allowing for a multi-year analysis; (ii) an accurate assessment of the user self-sufficiency and the EV battery degradation by means of a physics-inspired model; (iii) an evaluation of the potential economic impact for EV owners over multiple years. Applying the proposed V2G strategy to battery electric vehicles (BEVs) reduces the NLV at the transformer by up to 80%, while increasing self-sufficiency by up to 23%, producing a minimal battery degradation. In the current market scenario, if the Distribution System Operator (DSO) offers a fair compensation for the V2G grid support, the potential yearly economic savings for battery electric vehicle (BEV) owners equipped with a residential PV generator range between 10% and 20%. This happens despite the higher V2G charging stations’ upfront costs and the faster BEV battery degradation.

DOI Source

DOI: 10.1016/j.etran.2025.100394

Journal article2025

Economic competitiveness of BIPV in energy sharing configurations across selected European countries

Casalicchio V, Gonnella G, Maturi L, Barchi G

Grazia Barchi, Laura Maturi, Gabriella Gonnella, Valeria Casalicchio

Project: IT Ricerca di Sistema B FOURIER - Developement of a class of photovoltaic modules and systems based on mass-customization concepts. These systems will be adaptable to a wide range of projects involving the construction, maintenance or renovation of façades of multi-storey buildings., PNRR NEST - Network 4 Energy Sustainable Transition

Building-Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV) offer a promising solution for enhancing building energy efficiency and advancing the transition to renewable energy, particularly in urban environments where roof space is limited for traditional photovoltaic (PV) installations. However, compared to standard PV, the high installation costs associated with BIPV systems—stemming from their dual function as both architectural elements and energy generators—pose a significant barrier to their widespread adoption. This study examines the economic competitiveness and energy potential of BIPV systems in conjunction with energy-sharing mechanisms within Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) - specifically on a multi-family building scenario. It also assesses the impact of local photovoltaic incentives, in three representative European geo-clusters: Rome (Mediterranean), Vienna (Eastern), and Brussels (Continental Central). These cities were selected for their climatic diversity and recognition as European best practices in implementing provisions for RECs. The analysis compares the performance of BIPV systems with and without energy-sharing, accounting factors such as solar irradiation, financial incentives, and energy self-consumption. In Rome, energy-sharing integration increased the installed BIPV capacity by 70 %, while in Vienna, the increase was 292 % despite the absence of financial incentives. Brussels demonstrated a 59 % increase in installed BIPV capacity without incentives, which surged to 95 % with the introduction of green certificate incentives. These findings suggest that energy-sharing significantly enhances the economic viability of BIPV systems, even in regions with lower solar radiation. Additionally, while the higher upfront costs of BIPV systems can limit their adoption, energy-sharing mechanisms can effectively offset these costs, thereby improving the economic feasibility of BIPV installations.

DOI Source

DOI: 10.1016/j.egyr.2025.08.005

Journal article2025

Flexible Demand and Its Impacts on Future Utility‐Scale Photovoltaic Integration and Generation Costs: Case Study on the Italian Energy Transition

Veronese E, Manzolini G, Barchi G, Moser D

Grazia Barchi, Elisa Veronese

Project: EU HE SUPERNOVA

The energy transition implies an increase in electrical demand, which shall be met primarily by renewable energy sources, potentially raising costs for the system and the community. However, increasing consumption flexibility has the potential to reduce these additional costs by minimizing the risk of curtailment and reducing the need for new storage and grid line capacity. Few studies have been conducted to examine the techno-economic implications of improving consumption flexibility from an energy system perspective, but none have determined how these gains may affect future solar power integration costs. In this study, it is aimed to fill the gap by assessing the economic effects of flexible demand on solar integration and generation costs. Different scenarios for 2030 and 2040 of the Italian energy system are investigated taking into account future flexible demand availability and geographical distribution. In the results, it is shown that enabling a 12 h flexible demand can lower powerline transport capacity by up to 14%, and storage capacity by up to 25% in the 2040 scenarios. This corresponds to a reduction in photovoltaic (PV) generation costs from 11 to 13% by lowering overall PV integration costs, with peaks of up to 20% in some cases.

DOI Source

DOI: 10.1002/aesr.202400276

Journal article2025

Fully Solar Residential Energy Community: A Study on the Feasibility in the Italian Context

Barchi G, Pierro M, Secchi M, Moser D

Grazia Barchi, Marco Pierro

Project: EU H2020 TRUST-PV: Increase Friendly Integration of Reliable PV plants considering different market segments

Expanding the installation and use of renewable energy sources will help Europe reach its energy and climate goals. Additionally, users of small-scale photovoltaic systems will be essential to the energy transition by forming renewable energy communities (RECs). This paper offers a techno-economic analysis of the Italian REC incentive system and a suitable business model to encourage residential photovoltaic and battery installations and lower electricity costs. In this paper, we present a community model that includes a set number of prosumers, a growing number of consumers, and various configurations and management strategies for photovoltaic (PV) and battery systems. Key elements of novelty include (i) the implementation of a fully-solar REC with PV and storage under the Italian incentive scheme, (ii) the introduction a of novel centralized BESS control strategy based on firm generation that maximises energy sharing while minimising its grid impact, (iii) the economic profitability analysis of the PV and storage system for consumers and prosumers when different BESS control strategies are applied. The simulation results show that energy performance increases if a centralized battery management strategy is activated and more consumers join the community. In addition, the proposed business model shows that the best profitability is achieved when there are as many consumers as prosumers. Most importantly, the approach was extended to the extreme case of a “fully solar-powered” community, demonstrating that the REC model is viable even with the current PV and battery costs. Finally, we show that fully solar-powered communities can be easily implemented where homeowners have enough surface for PV installation and purchase a central battery through crowdfunding.

DOI Source

DOI: 10.3390/en18081988

Conference proceedings article2025

Smart Energy System Integration of Photovoltaic: From Strategic and Research Innovation Agenda to EU Funded Projects

Barchi G, Schönau M, Alet PJ, Efthymiou V, Chowdhury G, Perrin M, Shirazi E, A. Tsanakas I

Grazia Barchi

The EU has set an ambitious target to reach climate neutrality by 2050, with a rapidly rising share of PV and wind generation reshaping the energy system in terms of planning and operation. A high penetration of PV systems requires advanced monitoring and control systems and techniques, as well as technology that provides system stability and minimises congestion during peak production hours. In this context, Challenge 4 of the Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA), developed within ETIP-PV, is dedicated to “Smart Energy System Integration of Photovoltaics for Large-Scale Deployment and High Penetration”. Despite the Challenge identified six roadmaps, a systematic and scalable synthesis of the thematic evolution and strategic relevance of grid integration PV challenges, solutions, and evolutions remains limited in relation to EU-funded projects. This paper introduces an LLM-based methodology for analyzing a decade of EU-funded projects data, mapped to the Challeng 4 SRIA roadmap, and extracting indicators to reveal trends, dominant themes, and gaps. The framework provides a reproducible methodology to possibly guide research directions, funding priorities, and policy development.

DOI

DOI: 10.4229/EUPVSEC2025/5DV.3.37

Conference proceedings article2024

A Proposal for Regulatory and Market Reforms to Promote Firm/Dispatchable Solar Generation

Pierro M, Cornaro C, Moser D, Perez R, Barchi G

Grazia Barchi, Marco Pierro

Providing firm/dispatchable solar generation round the clock will be a prerequisite for the complete transition to Renewable Energy Source (RES). This work shows how the evolution of photovoltaic (PV) generation from variable/unconstrained to firm/dispatchable can be driven by regulatory and market reforms and appropriate incentives. First, we showed that solar farms can split their generation into baseload round the clock and variable/intermittent depending on the cost of storage. Then, by dividing the spot market into a variable renewable energy market and a day-ahead firm energy market, we showed through energy simulations and cost-benefit analysis that reasonable incentives for firm PV generation could currently reduce the flexibility requirement induced by large solar farms by 20%, by 30% by 2030, reaching full dispatchability by 2050.

DOI Source

DOI: 10.23919/AEIT63317.2024.10736877

Journal article2024

Ground-breaking approach to enabling fully solar renewable energy communities

Pierro M, Cornaro C, Moser D, Perez R, Perez M, Zambotti S, Barchi G

Grazia Barchi, Marco Pierro

Project: EU H2020 TRUST-PV: Increase Friendly Integration of Reliable PV plants considering different market segments

Renewable Energy Communities are an important strategy of the EU, to promote and optimize the distributed deployment of renewable generation systems. At current incentives and costs, RECs that share the energy produced by PV/battery systems are expected to take the lion's share of distributed generation. In this paper, we highlight some important critical issues in electric system management that could result from the deployment of RECs if PV/battery system generation cannot meet the entire community demand. Thus, we show how a flexible PV system (PV/battery systems able to provide firm/dispatchable generation) can be cost-effectively dimensioned to supply 24/365 96%–97 % of the demand of a residential users' community. We demonstrate that flexible PV systems of 1/10 MWp with 1.2/12 MWh of storage capacity can supply communities of 142/1420 residential users at a least production cost of 0.12/0.096 €/kWh. We further provide two business models based on power purchase agreement to demonstrate that, at these production costs, fully solar RECs are currently techno-economically feasible and provide mutual benefits to both flexible PV producers and REC members. Suitable virtual corporate PPAs can reduce the electric bill of the REC members by 11%–5% without requiring any investments and increase the producer incomes by 18%–22 %.

DOI Source

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2024.121501

Journal article2024

Impact of Non-Residential Users on the Energy Performance of Renewable Energy Communities Considering Clusterization of Consumptions

Veronese E, Lauton L, Barchi G, Prada A, Trovato V

Grazia Barchi, Elisa Veronese

Renewable energy communities foster the users’ engagement in the energy transition, paving the way to the integration of distributed renewable energy sources. So far, the scientific literature has focused on residential users in energy communities, thus overlooking the opportunities for industrial and commercial members. This paper seeks to bridge this gap by extending the analysis to the role of non-residential users. The proposed methodology develops an effective clustering approach targeted to actual non-residential consumption profiles. It is based on the k-means algorithm and statistical characterization based on relevant probability density function curves. The employed clusterization procedure allows for effectively reducing a sample of 49 real industrial load profiles up to 11 typical consumption curves, whilst capturing all the relevant characteristics of the initial population. Furthermore, a peer-to-peer sharing strategy is developed accounting for distributed and shared storage. Three scenarios are considered to validate the model with different shares of non-residential users, and the results are then evaluated by means of shared energy, self-consumption, and self-sufficiency indices. Moreover, the results show that the integration of a large non-residential prosumer in a REC may increase the self-sufficiency of residential members by 8.2%, self-consumption by 4.4%, and the overall shared energy by 37.3%. Therefore, the residential community consistently benefits from the presence of non-residential users, with larger users inducing more pronounced effects.

DOI Source

DOI: 10.3390/en17163984

Journal article2024

The role of flexible demand to enhance the integration of utility-scale photovoltaic plants in future energy scenarios: An Italian case study

Veronese E, Manzolini G, Barchi G, Moser D

Grazia Barchi, Elisa Veronese

Project: EU H2020 TRUST-PV: Increase Friendly Integration of Reliable PV plants considering different market segments

Photovoltaic (PV) will have a prominent role in the future energy mix to achieve the energy and climate targets. However, its variability requires that its exploitation must be improved to minimize its integration costs. The objective of this research is to provide a methodology applicable to any energy system modelling tool for assessing the benefits of flexible demand as an option to better manage the PV variability and to reduce its integration costs. Two strategies are used to shift the flexible demand within three different scenarios based on the Italian energy system and its planned evolution to the year 2030. The effects of flexibility are investigated through an expansion capacity optimization of battery energy storage systems (BESS) and powerlines transport capacities in three different scenarios. Results suggest that flexible demand allows to reduce the BESS capacity of around 2 %–6 %, and powerlines capacity in the range of 2%–10 %, thus the resulting VRES avoided integration costs varies from 758 M€ to 8611 M€. However, it has negligible effects in boosting RES penetration and lowering the CO₂ emissions. The estimated DSM remuneration opens up interesting possibilities for applications in the context of energy communities and electricity market aggregators.

DOI Source

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2024.120498

Technical
These cookies are necessary for the website to function and cannot be switched off.

Service	Decline/Accept	Terms Link
Youtube		https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7671399?...
Vimeo		https://vimeo.com/terms
Flourish		https://flourish.studio/terms/
Datawrapper		https://www.datawrapper.de/terms
Power BI		https://www.microsoft.com/en/servicesagreement/
Facebook		https://www.facebook.com/policies/cookies/
Instagram		https://help.instagram.com/1896641480634370?ref=ig
X		https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twi...
Google Maps		https://maps.google.com/help/terms_maps/
LinkedIn		https://www.linkedin.com/legal/cookie-policy

Journal article2025

Economic competitiveness of BIPV in energy sharing configurations across selected European countries

Casalicchio V, Gonnella G, Maturi L, Barchi G

Grazia Barchi, Laura Maturi, Gabriella Gonnella, Valeria Casalicchio

DOI Source

DOI: 10.1016/j.egyr.2025.08.005

Grazia Barchi

About

Scientific Publications

A pathway for firm and dispatchable solar/wind supply through generation and markets splitting

An advanced predictive battery control strategy for plus energy building flexibility: Simulation-based assessment and laboratory experimental setup

Advancing renewable energy community planning through integrated sector-coupling and economies of scale

Centralised vehicle-to-grid smart charging supported by PV generation for power variance minimisation at the transformer: A user’s perspective analysis

Economic competitiveness of BIPV in energy sharing configurations across selected European countries

Flexible Demand and Its Impacts on Future Utility‐Scale Photovoltaic Integration and Generation Costs: Case Study on the Italian Energy Transition

Fully Solar Residential Energy Community: A Study on the Feasibility in the Italian Context

Smart Energy System Integration of Photovoltaic: From Strategic and Research Innovation Agenda to EU Funded Projects

A Proposal for Regulatory and Market Reforms to Promote Firm/Dispatchable Solar Generation

Ground-breaking approach to enabling fully solar renewable energy communities

Impact of Non-Residential Users on the Energy Performance of Renewable Energy Communities Considering Clusterization of Consumptions

The role of flexible demand to enhance the integration of utility-scale photovoltaic plants in future energy scenarios: An Italian case study

Science Shots Eurac Research Newsletter

What we do

Where we are

Institutes & Centers

Follow us

My cookie preferences

External content

Scientific Publications

A pathway for firm and dispatchable solar/wind supply through generation and markets splitting

An advanced predictive battery control strategy for plus energy building flexibility: Simulation-based assessment and laboratory experimental setup

Advancing renewable energy community planning through integrated sector-coupling and economies of scale

Centralised vehicle-to-grid smart charging supported by PV generation for power variance minimisation at the transformer: A user’s perspective analysis

Economic competitiveness of BIPV in energy sharing configurations across selected European countries

Flexible Demand and Its Impacts on Future Utility‐Scale Photovoltaic Integration and Generation Costs: Case Study on the Italian Energy Transition

Fully Solar Residential Energy Community: A Study on the Feasibility in the Italian Context

Smart Energy System Integration of Photovoltaic: From Strategic and Research Innovation Agenda to EU Funded Projects

A Proposal for Regulatory and Market Reforms to Promote Firm/Dispatchable Solar Generation

Ground-breaking approach to enabling fully solar renewable energy communities

Impact of Non-Residential Users on the Energy Performance of Renewable Energy Communities Considering Clusterization of Consumptions

The role of flexible demand to enhance the integration of utility-scale photovoltaic plants in future energy scenarios: An Italian case study