Renewable Revolution

By Simone Malacrida

The book focuses on the particular role of renewable energy sources in the current context of social, political and technological revolutions and a crucial historical shift in the future reconciliation between development and the environment. New industrial and geopolitical balances impose a radical re-examination of some pre-existing concepts and the changing relationships between technology, society and daily life. The book is the second in an energy trilogy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookRix
• Release date: Apr 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9783755439127

Simone Malacrida

Simone Malacrida (1977) Ha lavorato nel settore della ricerca (ottica e nanotecnologie) e, in seguito, in quello industriale-impiantistico, in particolare nel Power, nell'Oil&Gas e nelle infrastrutture. E' interessato a problematiche finanziarie ed energetiche. Ha pubblicato un primo ciclo di 21 libri principali (10 divulgativi e didattici e 11 romanzi) + 91 manuali didattici derivati. Un secondo ciclo, sempre di 21 libri, è in corso di elaborazione e sviluppo.

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Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Renewable Revolution

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CONCLUSIONS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Renewable Revolution

RENEWABLE REVOLUTION

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SIMONE MALACRIDA

Simone Malacrida (1977)

Engineer and writer, has worked on research, finance, energy policy and industrial plants.

Be the change you want to see in the world.

Mohandas Gandhi

The book focuses on the particular role of renewable energy sources in the current context of social, political and technological revolutions and a crucial historical shift in the future reconciliation between development and the environment. New industrial and geopolitical balances impose a radical re-examination of some pre-existing concepts and the changing relationships between technology, society and daily life. The book is the second in an energy trilogy.

ANALYTICAL INDEX

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CONCLUSIONS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

ON THE THRESHOLD OF A REVOLUTION?

Talking about renewable sources and alternative energies is certainly not original. The subject, very fashionable nowadays, seems to have been gutted so many times as to not allow any significant addition to the energy, social and cultural debate that has seen a real boom in recent years.

Yet it is not so. It is not for a trivial fact that scientists, especially mathematicians, are well aware of. The solution of an equation does not depend only on the equation (as it is obvious that it is) but also on the boundary conditions, i.e. on all those situations which delimit and determine the field of action of the equation and the way of propagation of the properties from the initial problem to the solution found. In other words, by changing the boundary conditions, the same problem has different solutions and evolutions.

And this is precisely the contingent and current situation. In addressing the issue of renewable energies, new conditions have arisen, while others have changed. From this point of view, it makes sense to redefine and reposition the role of alternative sources to understand where this new solution will lead us.

Of course, there will be some surprises if you are used to reasoning with the old scheme and you will realize this both in this introduction and in the chapters of the book and in the final conclusions.

Here, it is necessary to introduce what were the boundary conditions that have changed and what is the new background context.

On a changeable, but nonetheless foreseen scenario, real discontinuities have arisen that have distorted the panorama.

What was widely foreseen by numerous studies and by every sociological survey is substantially the idea that there will be a widespread increase in living standards on the planet and that, at the same time, the human population will increase in number, up to nine billion individuals in 2050.

These two predicted data led to a simple conclusion. The world's energy demand will increase substantially. Hence the first question: how to satisfy these new energy needs? And from this question, the classic predictions and decisions descended.

The points of discontinuity with respect to this general approach, on the other hand, have been quite numerous and have followed one another in a very pressing way over the last three years. Among them we mention:

- the increase in the price of raw materials and, in particular, of oil

- the financial crisis of 2008-2010

- the oil rig accident in the Gulf of Mexico during the summer of 2010

- the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in spring 2011

- the social revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa of 2011

- the crisis of the European area of 2011, in particular referring to Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy

To analyze the impact of each of these facts on the global energy, social, geopolitical and economic system, entire books dedicated to each event would be needed and this obviously goes beyond the scope of this paper.

What is important to point out about these events is that, taken individually, they would not have been able to undermine an existing system, but if seen in their totality they give a very real idea of how the current situation is not the same as the one before -crisis. In other words, what was written and predicted before 2008-2009 is largely superseded by reality itself. Similarly, the solutions envisaged before 2009 are no longer valid, precisely because the surrounding conditions have changed.

By way of example, we cite only the fact that nuclear energy and forecasts on the future of electricity production from this source did not take into account the dramatic impact of the Japanese accident or that no sociological survey of Arab countries took into consideration the possibility of such a rapid overthrow of existing regimes.

In this new context, a new way of conceiving renewable sources is therefore needed, not because it is beautiful or to fill other pages of a book, but because, given the recent changes, it has become an urgent need if we really want to understand how to direct change. As will be clear at the end of the book, change and the future will happen anyway, even without our consent, we only have to choose whether to undergo this change, govern it, understand it or predict it.

To expose what has already been argued in a new way, it is necessary to introduce new arguments and possibilities that were previously considered purely imaginative, but which are now real and concrete potentialities.

This book follows exactly the vein just exposed and does so both in structural and in substantial terms.

In terms of exposition, the first three chapters are canonical and classical trying to introduce the issue of renewable energies in the existing energy context, describing what the renewable sources are and seeing the particular case of Italy. However, within them there are already the seeds of the new way of approaching the problem; in almost every paragraph, the new perspective and new vision will already be highlighted.

In the central chapters, the fourth, fifth and sixth, the main points of the discussion and the foundations of the new perspective are addressed, respectively in the links with research, politics, economy, the environment and society.

Particular attention will be given to the environment and to environmental disasters perpetrated by man as the energy vulnerability revolves around the very concept of the relationship between humanity and planet Earth.

Only by starting from research will there be that push towards renewable energies to make them integrated, efficient and functional, but only by arriving at a geopolitical and social level will it be possible to witness that great planetary change which is the new solution to the energy problem.

The final chapter will trace future forecasts and will take shape the idea behind this book, that of the fundamental energy revolution.

All the data for a new revolution are already there. We have witnessed two key passages in the past of contemporary society, one at the beginning of the 19th century and one at the beginning of the 20th century. In both there was a concurrence of change between social, industrial, cultural, political and energy aspects.

It is easy to see that the First Industrial Revolution took place in the first decades of the 19th century, following the discoveries and research made at the end of the 18th century on a particular branch of physics, thermodynamics. These researches focused attention on coal as an energy source for producing steam and thus fundamentally changing the very concept of machine and work.

On a social level, this has led to the creation of large industrial clusters, generating new and different problems with respect to the past, such as pollution, the assembly line and effectively creating a new social class: the proletariat. Hand in hand, new forms of power management were establishing themselves which replaced the last legacies of feudal aristocracy, a political system typically linked to an agricultural society. At the same time, a new form of communication such as that of newspapers was also spreading. It has been underlined several times how the drastic change of the first decades of the 19th century was not only industrial and energy, but also political, cultural and social and these simple considerations support this thesis. On the other hand, it is the very pervasive and all-encompassing essence of energy that implies this global perspective change.

Similarly, in the first decades of the twentieth century, the Second Industrial Revolution, which imposed oil as the primary energy source, had a political counterpart in the constitution in concrete form (actually, there were already many ideas about it in the previous century) of the two great ideologies of the twentieth century, communism and capitalism, and at the level of information technology in the emergence of the telephone, radio and television.

The society that arose from here is, broadly speaking, the current one, with uses and customs that have adapted to all this new energy flow available.

In the last twenty years, there has been a Third Industrial Revolution based on services and information technology (for which we now speak of a post-industrial society) which has gone hand in hand with the end of the mass production system and with the 'advent of a third generation of communications, given by the Internet and mobile phones.

Now, the discontinuities mentioned above have highlighted that we are on the threshold of a third energy revolution, based on renewable sources precisely because the current model is under discussion, based on predominantly fossil non-renewable sources which, not by chance, are at the origin of all the rupture events mentioned above.

As in those that have already passed, a revolution of this kind would take on the characteristics of the energy source responsible for the change. The Seven Sisters arose from oil, from the intrinsic nature of renewable sources it could (and logically should) arise in a bidirectional distributed model.

In turn, this would have consequences on the economic and political system, such as the beginning of a new widespread democratic era and a more egalitarian economic system in a society that pays ever greater attention to the quality of life linked to a more responsible vision of environmental impacts, energy efficiency and a more conscious use of the resources at our disposal.

It will be understood how much this revolution is possible and depends on us (and not so much on international bodies), only at the end of the book, in the conclusions. At the beginning, it was necessary to have an understanding of the situation and the peculiarity of this historical passage in order to redesign the society of tomorrow.

The choice is only up to us.

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 1

THE ENERGY CONTEXT

In order to correctly introduce renewable sources, it is first necessary to outline the energy context in which they are located. If this were not done, the fundamental background given by the frame of reference would be lost and, therefore, what we are going to expose in this book would be devoid of a compass by which to orient ourselves in the intricate maze of numbers, problems and connections that the energy establishes.

The energy context is first and foremost characterized by the global picture, a view from above on the real dimensions of the energy factor and what role renewable sources have at this given moment. It goes without saying that, given the intrinsic dynamism in everything, this framework is destined to change, even radically, just as there have been epochal upheavals in the past.

On the other hand, without understanding the current contingent there is no possibility of understanding the way to the future.

The energetic context is also completed by two concomitant factors. First of all, energy efficiency which, in itself, is not an energy source either fossil or renewable or of any other type, but which plays a primary role when it comes to research, the future, geopolitics, economy, society and the environment.

Finally, the question of complexity cannot be avoided. Energy is a difficult topic precisely because it fits into a theory of complexity that is well suited to it.

This initial picture presented is to be kept in mind in each paragraph of the following chapters, as a kind of reminiscence to which everything belongs.

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The global energy picture

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World energy demand increased tenfold during the 20th century from 1,000 to 10,000 Mtoe. Mtoe means millions of tons of oil equivalent and is the unit of measurement used to compare the various sources of energy.

This increase is due to the constant growth of the world population and to the greater need for energy per capita for the uses that have gradually been introduced during the last century (cars and transport in general, the heating systems of houses and offices and the distribution of electricity and electrical appliances).

From 2000 to today, demand has grown further, reaching around 12,500 Mtoe in 2010.

This world primary energy is mainly used in three different sectors: transport, electricity and the domestic, residential and industrial heating (and conditioning) sector.

The percentages of use in these sectors, as well as the differences between world, European and Italian use, are shown below, also considering the percentages relating to the same sectors in 1973, a year considered a watershed in the second part of the twentieth century by virtue of the onset of the first oil crisis.

Domestic, residential and industrial sector:

a)  global percentage today 35.2% (in 1973 it was 37.5%)

b)  European percentage today 36.3% (in 1973 it was 38.1%)

c)  Italian percentage today 35.7% (in 1973 it was 37.7%)

Transport sector:

a)  world percentage today 34.7% (in 1973 it was 31%)

b)  European percentage today 33.2% (in 1973 it was 31.9%)

c)  Italian percentage today 34.1% (in 1973 it was 31.8%)

Electric energy:

a)  world percentage today 30.1% (in 1973 it was 31.5%)

b)  European percentage today 30.5% (in 1973 it was 30%)

c)