Iain Staffell

Iain Staffell is a multi-disciplinary scientist holding degrees in Physics, Chemical Engineering and Economics. He is a Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Energy at the Centre for Environmental Policy with fifteen years’ experience in energy R&D.

Iain is co-developer of the Renewables.ninja, an open web platform that lets you simulate the hourly power output from wind and solar power plants located anywhere in the world. Iain also leads the Electric Insights project, an interactive website and quarterly report on the supply, demand, price and environmental impacts of Britain's electricity. He is one of the founders of Power Swarm, a network of 400 academics, industry and government experts working on power system transformation

Iain's research centres on decarbonising electricity systems, ranging from the economics of battery storage and productivity of offshore wind farms to efficient ways of integrating renewables into electricity markets. Broad research areas include the potential of an interconnected super-grid and smart energy storage systems to reduce the cost and carbon emissions of generating electricity across Europe; the impacts that climate change will have on the business case for renewables; the role of flexible fossil power in balancing decarbonised energy systems; and residential-scale microgeneration for decarbonising the heat sector.

As energy, renewables and carbon are never far from the public eye, Iain's resarch and commentary have appeared in the BBC (2), The New York Times, Time Magazine, Der Spiegel, The FT (2) (3), Forbes (2), The Times (2) (3), The Telegraph (2), The Guardian (2) (3), CNN, The Sun, Huffington Post, The Conversation, Bloomberg (2), Quartz (2), Vice, Die Zeit and Esquire.

Iain holds a visiting position at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology - ETH Zürich, within the Climate Policy Group.

Teaching

Iain co-convenes the Energy Policy option of the Environmental Technology MSc course, lecturing on energy systems, economics and policy. He also teaches for Imperial College Business School on the MSc in Economics & Strategy for Business and Climate Change, Management & Finance, and for the Energy Futures Lab on the MSc in Sustainable Energy Futures.

Selected Publications

Journal Articles

• Geske J, Green R, Staffell I, 2020, Elecxit: the cost of bilaterally uncoupling British-EU Electricity Trade, Energy Economics, Vol:85, ISSN:0140-9883, Pages:1-16
• Bosch J, Staffell I, Hawkes AD, 2019, Global levelised cost of electricity from offshore wind, Energy, Vol:189, ISSN:0360-5442, Pages:116357-116357
• Staffell I, Scamman D, Velazquez Abad A, et al., 2019, The role of hydrogen and fuel cells in the global energy system, Energy & Environmental Science, Vol:12, ISSN:1754-5692, Pages:463-491
• Schmidt O, Melchior S, Hawkes A, et al., 2019, Projecting the future levelized cost of electricity storage technologies, Joule, Vol:3, ISSN:2542-4351, Pages:81-100
• Staffell IL, Wilson IAG, 2018, Rapid fuel switching from coal to natural gas through effective carbon pricing, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Vol:3, ISSN:1520-8524, Pages:365-372
• Staffell IL, Pfenninger S, 2017, The increasing impact of weather on electricity supply and demand, Energy, Vol:145, ISSN:0360-5442, Pages:65-78
• Grams CM, Beerli R, Pfenninger S, et al., 2017, Balancing Europe's wind power output through spatial deployment informed by weather regimes, Nature Climate Change, Vol:7, ISSN:1758-678X, Pages:557-562
• Schmidt O, Hawkes A, Gambhir A, et al., 2017, The future cost of electrical energy storage based on experience rates, Nature Energy, Vol:2
• Staffell IL, 2017, Measuring the progress and impacts of decarbonising British electricity, Energy Policy, Vol:102, ISSN:1873-6777, Pages:463-475
• Pfenninger S, DeCarolis J, Hirth L, et al., 2016, The importance of open data and software: Is energy research lagging behind?, Energy Policy, Vol:101, ISSN:0301-4215, Pages:211-215
• Staffell IL, Pfenninger S, 2016, Using bias-corrected reanalysis to simulate current and future wind power output, Energy, Vol:114, ISSN:0360-5442, Pages:1224-1239
• Pfenninger S, Staffell IL, 2016, Long-term patterns of European PV output using 30 years of validated hourly reanalysis and satellite data, Energy, Vol:114, ISSN:0360-5442, Pages:1251-1265
• Staffell I, Green R, 2015, Is There Still Merit in the Merit Order Stack? The Impact of Dynamic Constraints on Optimal Plant Mix, Ieee Transactions on Power Systems, Vol:31, ISSN:1558-0679, Pages:43-53
• Staffell I, Green R, 2014, How does wind farm performance decline with age?, Renewable Energy, Vol:66, ISSN:0960-1481, Pages:775-786
• Staffell I, Green R, 2013, The cost of domestic fuel cell micro-CHP systems, International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, Vol:38, ISSN:0360-3199, Pages:1088-1102