By Rosy Matrangolo
We are aware of this, there are serious environmental and health reasons to accelerate a transition, a transformation of views, actions and investments on the use of renewable sources for the energy we need every day for our lives.
Global warming and depletion of fossil fuels
The temperature of our planet is increasing without control: what the experts and the scientific community unanimously recognize as an emergency, is still struggling to find the right grip on public opinion.
But if global warming in the ideal of many is identified almost exclusively exclusively with the image of the ice of the poles that melt under the legs of bears at risk of extinction, there has long been who started to wonder what will be the consequences of an unsustainable climate on wealth and development strategies (the topic that won the Nobel Prize for Economics 2018).
In our country, the evidence of climate change is already found in agriculture (mango and quinoa are now Made in Italy while we will soon lose some of the typical Mediterranean climate productions ), in tourism, but also among the causes of migrations into Europe.
Mario Pagliaro, research chemist at the CNR in Palermo, presented his latest volume, "Helionomics, energy freedom with solar" on the occasion of the CSR fair and sustainable innovation 2018 organized in Milan by Bocconi University.
With this editorial proposal the author intends to show that there is a chance to drastically reduce the use of fossil resources and is called solar energy.
Beyond oil, the advantages of solar energy
" Going beyond oil is possible, even necessary ", explains the researcher, who in his text dissects the critical data : " history teaches us - the volume reads - that every time the price of the barrel has risen above 80 dollars, the global economy has entered into crisis and often into recession. The world is thirsty for oil, but for cheap oil, at a cost of less than 40 dollars, which we no longer have ".
A resource that sooner or later will be exhausted whose extraction techniques have become increasingly invasive in the search for the raw material in depth or in the exploration of new deposits. All this, at increasingly higher costs also for the import markets, and therefore, for the final consumer .
Furthermore, the alternative solution of natural gas may not be sufficient to make up for the drop in oil production while coal is already at the index and many countries are reviewing (and closing) the activity of thermoelectric power plants from coal.
The revolution referred to by Pagliaro is silent, reluctantly because these are good practices in the transition to a solar economy that are still little known. And here is the purpose of the informative cut volume.
" In Italy the economy and society ignore each other - said the Sicilian chemist - the few know of the collapse of prices for the production of electricity and for heating from renewable sources that we can now safely define as being more competitive than burning coal or nuclear fission "(Italy imports nuclear energy from neighboring countries such as France, ed).
At the local level we have perfectly functioning examples of "stop and go" plants in which the old plants have reduced their activity by up to 80% because the local demand is mostly satisfied by the wind and by the smartly installed solar system. This greatly reduces the costs and gains air quality based on the emissions reduction of the plants ".
Sustainable lifestyle, what to do from Monday
Green jobs as professions that will save the world, solar tiles, floating panels, electric mobility, solar dumps : these are just some of the solutions proposed in detail in the volume.
" The new solar and photovoltaic panels already guarantee an activity of even 50 years - the researcher explained - and disposal will be easier as well as solving the big question, the storage of energy overproduction : lithium ion batteries allow not to "waste" the energy produced by accumulating it without waste We are at the beginning of a new era that could see Italy as the protagonist .
To the Italian creativity and know-how the author addresses a reference bringing an example that inspires confidence : " In 2018 there is no longer any conflict between solar energy and beauty - reads Helionomics -: companies, Italian designers have come up with solutions that have embellished and improved the technologies by giving them full capacity to integrate with the beauty of the architectural, historical, monumental and even archaeological heritage, the photovoltache tiles, designed to harmonize with terracotta coverings and consisting of glazed pipes are practically invisible ".
In short, it is the advance of solar, beauty!
