Research focus and theoretical core
My current research agenda investigates how industrial policy, innovation policy and energy policy can be jointly designed to govern structural change under the joint constraints of decarbonisation, energy security, affordability and cost-effectiveness, technological transformation and territorial heterogeneity. The underlying research question is how policy mixes can move beyond the separate treatment of innovation and energy, and instead coordinate technological creation, regime destabilisation and the expansion of adequate, secure and affordable low-carbon energy systems. This agenda builds on the Creation-Destruction-Expansion framework, conceptualised in a paper currently under submission, where “Expansion” captures the need to align innovation-driven demand growth with clean electricity supply, grids, flexibility, permitting, market design and long-term contractual arrangements. In this perspective, the energy transition is not evaluated only through environmental targets, but through a broader policy triangle linking sustainability, security of supply and economic viability.
A transversal concern of this agenda is the multi-level nature of policy design and implementation. Drawing also on the entrepreneurial ecosystem policy literature, energy and innovation policies are understood as being formulated across macro, meso and micro levels: macro-level strategies — planned by national or supranational institutions — define missions, financial envelopes and regulatory constraints; meso-level actors such as regional governments, innovation agencies, universities, intermediaries and ecosystem support organisations translate these frameworks into operational programmes; micro-level actors — firms, consumers, communities, research groups and local institutions — determine whether policy signals become actual technological adoption, investment, behavioural change and territorial impact. This multi-level perspective appears to be particularly relevant for studying regional ecosystems, where top-down national or European policy frameworks interact with place-based capabilities, institutional legacies, local coordination mechanisms and knowledge desorption/absorption dynamics.
Regional ecosystems and technology transfer
A first strand focuses on regional knowledge ecosystems and technology transfer. Through the ECOSISTER case, the research analyses how a regional ecosystem can translate national and European transition-oriented policy frameworks into place-based mechanisms of knowledge creation, technology transfer, orchestration and territorial impact. This work connects the energy-transition agenda with regional innovation studies, showing how universities, public research organisations, intermediaries and regional agencies may support sustainability-oriented innovation when they operate within dense institutional and productive systems. ECOSISTER is therefore used not only as a case of technology transfer, but also as a case of multi-level policy translation: a macro-level policy intervention becomes effective only if meso-level orchestration and micro-level organisational capabilities transform funding into collaboration, prototypes, innovation opportunities and territorial value. The specific analytical focus is on interdependencies within regional networks, on relational dynamics among ecosystem agents, and on the mechanisms of knowledge desorption and absorption among agents and between agents and regional ecosystem institutions.
EU energy-policy beliefs and the traverse
A second strand concerns the political economy of EU energy-policy beliefs. Building on Cardinale, Cardinale and Zupic’s analysis of the mismatch between EU gas-policy beliefs and changing international gas markets, this future paper would extend the approach from natural gas to the broader corpus of EU energy policy, mapping continuities and discontinuities across policy domains, energy carriers and transition phases. The proposed extension would ask whether EU energy policy remains shaped by inherited liberalisation and internal-market beliefs, including the assumption that security of supply can be ensured primarily through market-based mechanisms, internal integration, contractual flexibility and intra-EU coordination. It would then assess whether these beliefs are adequate for a phase in which decarbonisation requires massive infrastructure expansion, electrification, flexibility, industrial coordination and demand-aware planning. The theoretical contribution would be to connect policy-belief analysis with Lowe’s notion of traverse. If the energy transition is interpreted as a structural passage from one productive and institutional configuration to another, then the key issue is not only identifying dominant beliefs, but assessing whether those beliefs support or obstruct the policy corrections needed to move the system along a viable transition path. In this sense, Lowe appears appropriate as the theoretical lens for interpreting the policy implications of the findings: after mapping EU energy-policy beliefs, the paper would ask which corrective actions, sequencing choices and institutional adjustments are required to make the transition economically viable, secure and socially sustainable.
Electricity-cost indicators
A third strand concerns the measurement and interpretation of energy production and dispatch costs in decarbonising power systems. The work on "beyond LCOE [1]" indicators addresses the limitations of plant-level cost comparisons and systematically reviews alternative metrics that incorporate integration costs — including profile, balancing, grid and adequacy costs, as well as technical stability issues. This research contributes to the policy debate by clarifying when renewables can be considered "cheap" only at the asset level, and when broader system-level costs must be included to support more reliable investment and policy decisions.
Collective energy procurement and PPAs
A fourth strand examines demand-side coordination in electricity markets. The project on collective Power Purchase Agreements studies whether PPAs can be reconfigured from corporate procurement instruments into collective or territorial energy-procurement mechanisms involving households, SMEs, public actors, energy communities, municipalities, industrial clusters and aggregators. The central hypothesis is that collective PPAs may reduce asymmetries between large and small consumers, improve bargaining power, and partially smooth the mismatch between renewable generation profiles and fragmented consumption profiles, while remaining dependent on governance design, regulation, risk allocation and intermediary capacity.
Retail tariff design and time-of-use signals
A fifth strand extends this demand-side perspective to retail electricity tariff design. Starting from recent work on time-of-use tariffs and critical peak pricing, this project will investigate whether the current Italian time-band structure should be recalibrated in light of changing wholesale price patterns, solar generation, flexible loads and the increasing value of intra-day demand shifting. The aim is to assess whether a redesigned Italian tariff structure could provide low-cost incentives for consumers to shift consumption toward hours of abundant renewable generation, thereby reducing integration costs, improving affordability and supporting system stability. The Italian case is particularly relevant because existing tariff signals may no longer be aligned with the temporal structure of electricity-market prices and renewable generation.
Biodiesel in heavy-duty road transport
A sixth strand examines biodiesel in heavy-duty road transport as a potential transitional or sustaining technology whose role depends on value-chain complementarities and policy-mix configuration. Drawing on the Italian case and on EU and Italian policy documents, the project combines secondary data from sectoral observatories and reports with semi-structured interviews to analyse bottlenecks across upstream feedstock collection, midstream production and distribution, and downstream adoption by heavy-truck users. The central argument is that biodiesel’s technical adaptability to existing fleets is not sufficient on its own: its contribution to decarbonisation depends on completing the downstream policy architecture, reducing uncertainty for users, supporting aftermarket solutions and governing the allocation of scarce sustainable feedstocks across competing sectors.
Concluding remarks
Overall, these projects form my research agenda on the governance of the energy transition as a problem of structural change. They combine conceptual work on industrial-policy frameworks, regional ecosystem research, policy-belief mapping, systematic evidence synthesis, electricity-market analysis and transport-decarbonisation value-chain analysis. Their common contribution is to show that decarbonisation is not only a technological substitution process, but a coordinated transformation of infrastructures, institutions, markets, territories and policy paradigms, requiring policy mixes that are sustainable, secure, affordable and operationally effective across macro, meso and micro levels.
[1] The Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE) is arguably the most widely used metric for comparing electricity costs, although it primarily captures plant-level generation costs and largely neglects broader system-level costs.
