European Energy Markets 2025 in Lisboa

This week, I went to Lisbon for a conference.

I stayed in a hostel, which was an interesting experience. Even though I could have spent about 100€ per night, I somehow was seeking the adventure and chose the hostel life. As I am staying on vacation in Lisbon after the conference as well, I did not want to move in between my stay.

The hostel I have been to is called G-Spot hostel. It sounds a little explicit but actually all people I talked to were nice, clean and friendly and nothing weird has happened. Some people said that they only took a cheap hostel and did not even look at the name - well one has to say that the place of the hostel is indeed quite central and a good spot though.

Features of the hostel include

• free beer/wine from 9pm to 10pm
• free breakfast from 9am to 11am (same everyday though, mostly sweet things)

I arrived there safely by bus, and walked around the city to get to know my surroundings a little more and prepared myself for the next few days. In the evening I met up with a college who did go to Lisbon with his camper van. We found something to eat near the riverside of Lisbon.

Conference Days

The conference was very crowded. More than 300 presentations are there. Each of them taking 7 minutes plus a few minutes for questions.

What I did not like that much was the great amount of time given to other external speakers. The morning session consisted completely of keynotes happening until noon, when we had a meal.

It was not that bad, but having an hour talk by an energy provider doing flexible tariffs is also quite long.

After the meal, there are two sessions à 90 minutes in which the research presentations take place. There are always 5 parallel tracks going on, so one has to decide into which of the tracks to go to. I was very unhappy that the EEM committee did not publish the uploaded files through conftool (the webpage managing the conference). They generally do for other conferences as well as in previous years. Quite absurd to ask relevant deep questions after getting a glimpse of the work for 7 minutes.

Still, there are some people who are somehow quite deep in various topics and manage to ask good and relevant questions anyway. This is a very cool skill if you ask me.

First day

I came to the conference without having my breakfast, as the conference already started at 9 and I had to commute half an hour to it.

The first day was quite good and interesting. It almost feels like a good meetup of researchers where you somehow get to know more and more of the established people. Hearing from others, that they heard about you once you are talking is also very cool and did happen at least once on this conference.

In the evening I went with two good friends/researchers to the port, bought some Port wine and tonic water and enjoyed the sunset there. While it is a rather tourist thing, Port Tonic seems to be a thing, which I found to enjoy.

Second day

This day, I had my presentation about energy market simulations. The paper for this will hopefully be published soon. It tackles questions whether a higher spatial resolution of the weather data used to calculate renewables generation also increases the accuracy of the resolution. It turns out, that this depends as always on the input data and validation availability. Though I would recommend to just model nation-wide as the approximation is good enough for most cases and the increased complexity and required calculations are only seldomly worth it. So that’s my short technical detour about my research.

I did not practice my talk and probably tried to put a little too much information into the talk, though it went really well and I got good feedback and questions.

In the evening of the second day, there is the Conference Dinner. As I had to print a poster for the next day, I still spent a little bit of time at the ISEL and then needed to go directly to the dinner.

We had to be on time, as the dinner took place on a boat cruising around the Targus river.

It was really nice. While it sounds like this is just to relax and show off, the conference meetups, as well as the breaks in between the sessions are always very important for me. During the presentations one can get a glimpse of the work people do, but in one-to-one talks one can focus much more on specific things. Also talking about research proposals, PhD curricular in general and technical details. Sometimes things still get a more off-topic, so one just has to find the right balance for yourself. The prejudice of PhD conference people who do not talk about their private life, but mostly about work related things is therefore of course fulfilled. This of course is very exhaustive, so it helps to be very communicative going to such events and have a good social battery to handle three days of this.

Third day

Speaking of exhausted social capabilities, many people did not appear at the third day anymore or skipped half of it. It was much less crowded and the lunch buffet at noon was not directly empty after serving started.

I had a good discussion about inertia of power systems and how renewables currently do not have something like this. They actually could have inertia quite easily by virtually responding slower to the grid frequency and adding some slowness in the inverter itself for example. I did not yet check why this is not done yet, as it seems very useful to have, especially for larger facilities. But in the end I am still a computer scientist and not that deep in electrical engineering. Still, people who criticize the switch to renewable electricity generation due to insufficient inertia are quite missing out on the bigger picture.

I had a poster session in the break between the two presentation sessions as well. The poster sessions took place in a dedicated room, which got very noisy and hot, so it was not really enjoyable to be there.

Finally, I did not mainly select the last talks I went to through interest and topic, but chose talks of people I know to get a better understanding of their work and how it tackles mine.

Concluding, it was very good to be on a conference again, as I really like the two parts - hearing about other peoples work, and networking and connecting with people in general. So this was the conference.

Free time

As the working part of my trip is over, I enjoyed another full week in Lisbon. Everything was quite rushed before I got there, so I did not make any plans for this week (and also because vacation planning is some of my least-enjoyed things somehow). I am very happy how everything went along and hope to also provide a good read about my trip there.

Trip to Sesimbra

The first day after the conference I got up to get some breakfast. A Hungarian girl told me that her plan of going with someone has been cancelled. She did not ask directly but told me that she would not like going there alone. Great, why not go with a random stranger from the hostel I know for 5 minutes on a day trip? I did not have any plans so we agreed to go together - and It turned out very good!

We first planned to go by bus, but as it was more than an hour until the next bus was going, we took an Uber instead, which costs less than 25€ for a trip of about one hour - very cheap - but so is public transport. It was an electric car and very hot. The driver tried to tell us that he would not like to turn the air condition on, as this would reduce his range quite drastically. Instead, we had the windows a crack wide open, which was enough for a cool breeze.

In Sesimbra, we ate Croissants at “O melhor de Croissant da minha rua”. They have sweet croissants, which you can order with different types. One option is ham and cheese, which was really delicious as it somehow was sweet but also hearty.

We then went to the beach, had a good hike, good talks and a nice swim in turquoise water.

The spot we went to is a little outside. It is called “Praia do Ribeiro do Cavalo” and is a really beautiful place.

One should have good shoes with you to go down there.

The new friend I found had to be back at the hostel at a given time, so we also took an Uber back to Lisbon. In the end I value time over money in most cases (but there are also other factors to go by bus, like environmental or having the more local feeling).

Night out in Lisbon

In our room of 8 beds (6 of them filled), there was also a British couple. They also were at the hostel happy hour from 9-10 and played some card games. After the happy hour finished, we went out to bars and party. That was very good and felt more authentic than going on a pub crawl with a fixed schedule.

We somehow lost each other at 2am though, but I got back to the hostel safely.

Alfama

The next day I joined the British couple on a trip to explore the city further. We ate a Bifana at the most popular shop (which mostly has a queue there) and then got to Alfama.

This quarter is really nice to see. At a good sightseeing spot, a guy was playing street music with a guitar. I then realized that I did not hear a lot of street music in Lisbon until then.

We discussed being grown-ups while she considered that this more refers to people who have kids. Asking me if I would consider myself grown-up I responded “I am going to a G-Spot Hostel for a business trip, which is quite odd, but beyond that, I think so”. Pretty much summing up my situation there.

Back in the main part of Lisbon, I spent a little solo trip time to walk around alone.

Lisbon has quite funny (and expensive) ways of elevating people.

There is an Escalator on the street in Alfama, a very old elevator from 1903 you can go on for 5€ as well as a few spots of funicular taking you up a street (for 4.20€ - you could walk 3 minutes uphil to get to the end yourself). Pretty cool to see, but I did not feel like going onto an elevator trip that much.

First time Surfing

While having quite a lot of experience surfing the internet, I haven’t done that on the sea yet. As I do have quite some time available to visit Lisbon, I wanted to try that out (sorry for the bad joke). The Hungarian girl from the trip to Sesimbra has been to Lisbon before and recommended a surfing school to me.

In the evening I got to know someone who also had plans to go surfing there the next day, so we joined on that.

The surfing school was pretty good, I enjoyed it a lot and even got to stand on the board the first time I did this.

I went surfing at Lisbon Surf Camp in Carcavelos which cost 30€ per surf hour including the board and suit. After surfing, you wash your neoprene suit yourself, which is fine.

Afterward, we visited Cascais, a city further to the west. I did feel a little bit rushed from my companion going with me, so I thought about staying in Cascais a little longer and visit Belém on my own without rushing from sightseeing spot to the next one. Instead, I caught up with the Hungarian girl and her friend, who were nearby, and we visited Belém together. I directly felt much more relaxed and had a better vibe.

Quite interesting how you sometimes have the same goal and vision of something and it turns out so well, while it sometimes does not turn out that well because of different priorities and less room for compromise.

After Belém, we visited the other side of Lisbon to see the sunset. Quite a good spot actually, but it was also very windy. This did not stop us from having a good time and a small picnic (it actually did, because the paper cup did spill and fly away, but we managed to get along).

In hindsight, it was a very good choice how I spent my evining there.

Trip to Sintra

I did a solo trip to Sintra, which is a town a little away from Lisbon. Visiting the tourist attractions was not on my list, so I skipped the things one requires a ticket for - the Pena Palace of Sintra, the Castelo dos Mouros and the Sintra National Palace. The old city of Sintra is worth a view though and as a less advertised but still great spot, the Park in Sintra was very nice and had peacocks running around.

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Besides of the quite common tuk-tuks, there were also talking self-driving cars to rent. Self-driving cars in Europe in 2025? I doubt it. Well… It is just a Renault Twizy you can rent and drive yourself, while it tells you about the spots you are at. I get the point, that normally, you have a tour guide to drive the vehicle, using “self-driving” in this context is like the joke about a “self-cleaning” kitchen. Everyone has to clean up yourself right?

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I then went to the Cabo da Roca by bus. The most western point of continental Europe. Just in time before leaving I got the recommendation to visit Praia da Ursa.

During the hike to it, I somehow got to the beach a little more in the South to “Praia da Aroeira”. There I enjoyed the beach alone, being the only person who was there at all. Without mobile connection or anything else. This was a very nice and silent feeling, though I did not feel completely safe, as the hike down to the beach was very steep and not that easily with my shoes. Exactly this is probably the reason why no one else went there that day.

I still wanted to see the Ursa beach as well, and did hike there. It is a wonderful beach as can be seen on the pictures.

Going back up to the street, I met a German couple and a German woman. I asked if they were going back to Lisbon though to maybe join up on an Uber, but the woman stayed in a camper van with her boyfriend, while the couple was going to Cascais. Back at her camper van, she offered me a cold beer while waiting, which was very nice. The next bus took quite a while to come and is not that reliable, so I asked the couple which by then arrived as well to take me to Cascais.

They had rented a car and went through the cities by car only stopping by sometimes. To me, this does not feel very relaxing as you also have to manage tolls, the big cities and parking quite a lot.

In Cascais I took the train back to Lisbon. I really like that you somehow always meet new people and have a quick chat, though more often than not, these conversations are scratching the surface only.

Another surf trip

The last full day going on, I went surfing for a third time, and quite improved a lot. When learning something new, one can not improve everything at the same time. During learning and improving, you sometimes forget the basics again while focusing too much on the next step you want to learn.

So I had to

• practice the 3-step take-off
• put 80% of the weight to the front, 20% to the back
• put the front foot in the middle correctly
• place the back foot a little more forward
• bend the knees more
• don’t stand up on the knees (I don’t know why I suddenly started doing this)
• lay a little more to the front of the board
• look to the front

You typically have to improve everything at once, but don’t really know how to do this. Especially, when you do not really know what went wrong, it helps to have someone telling you and watching you.

I even caught a wave myself and was able to stand on it, so I had good progress which felt awesome. Though the waves were very small and good for beginners, I really liked it. And I would not have thought that this trip would have me surfing three times finally.

Finally, I also went to a Portuguese restaurant which the least touristic place I could find there. The people there did only speak a little bit of English, so I ordered my food with the little of Portuguese I know by now, also from my other trip to Brazil. I even got a leite creme, which is similar to Crème brûlée, but typical for Portugal.

Going back to the airport I gave my tram card with one Euro of charge left to some stranger, right according to my post about this. The guy was very happy about it and it seemed that I did not create much skepticism about it - yay.

Final wrap up

Staying in a hostel for a business trip was the best decision for my traveling. The opportunities, experiences and advices you get there are very valuable. It was my first trip to Portugal and my first longer stay alone in a hostel. I somewhat regret that I did not try that earlier. In the mid-20s I am increasing the average age of hostel visitors in my hostel already, though I did not have the feeling of only having 18-year-old people hanging around.

For me social moments are much more bonding than sightseeing, yet Lisbon also has a lot to offer for the latter as well.

I had so many good experiences with people. Which in general resembles my positive attitude against strangers, but this of course might not always be the best attitude and slip through the border of becoming naive. But the goal in life should not be risk avoidance, but to take situations and adventures as they come and make the best of it.