The good news is that the Draghi government's change of pace can be seen and heard: the nefarious embrace of the bureaucracy loosens up, the authorization system tries to get out of the quagmire, the objectives and even the path become less nebulous. We will make it possible to meet the commitments to make the ecological transition credible by reaching the targets for 2030 and 2050 that commit us to us, to Europe and above all to the planet? Here's the less good news: the challenge is nearly impossible. Is it worth trying? Yes of course. Because we have to. And because there are no alternatives. But in order to really change pace, it is first of all necessary to focus on the terms of the question.
THE BOUNDARY OF DELAYS
Little consolation: other countries are no better than us in making credible the new and more ambitious decarbonisation objectives set by the European Union for 2030, i.e. cutting emissions by 55% compared to 1990 by winning over the greater efficiency of the energy system to reduce energy demand by 8% by 2050 without hampering development. Indeed, there are those who do worse. Italy had not started badly. In 2018 it had reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 22% compared to 1990 even if it struggled to break away from the leading group for absolute missions, for those per capita and per unit of GDP. However, we were the only European countries to have already achieved the 2019 renewable energy targets in 2020, with final consumption exceeding 18% compared to the 17% target.
Of the European partners, as many as 13 were still far from the objectives in 2019, including France and Germany, which continues to enjoy a somewhat blurred benevolence in international analyses: it flaunts the commitment to renewables but continues to build new coal-fired plants, with which it continues to produce a third of its electricity, even with recourse to the mephitic fumes of anthracite and lignite. While Italy is at least willing. Not far from the next goals? Unfortunately this is not the case. Not only because of the pandemic "in 2020 the new installed power of renewable sources - remarked Livio De Santoli, rector of the Sapienza University of Rome and president of the Free coordination corridor for renewables - was less than 1 gigawatt. At this rate, the objectives of renewables for 2030 will be achieved in a hundred years".
COLLECTION ATTEMPT
The minister of ecological transition Roberto Cingolani is peremptory: "To achieve the decarbonization of 55% 70 gigawatts of renewables will be needed over the next nine years, 8 GW per year”. Practically the complete renewal, or almost so, of our electricity supply scenario. In the name of financial resources that are not lacking on paper, given that the Pnrr alone (the National Recovery and Resilience plan that channels the new post-Covid European subsidies) dedicates around 16 billion a year to the mission, 40 million a day out of the 100 million that will be used to fully fulfill the promise, to be achieved through a general electrification of energy consumption in the name of efficiency and environmental compatibility, pivoting among other things on an ambitious plan for electric mobility.
The Italian company equips itself, aware of the benefits effects of the new run also on the development of new business areas. Carlo Tamburi, director for Italy of the Enel group repeats: "by 2025 we would be able to produce electricity only from renewable sources of our mantra electrification of consumption, in mobility as in homes". And his enterprise promises to accelerate the total abandonment of coal and the race for an integrated system under the banner of the new intelligence of the energy system, made up of exchanges between producers, integrated energy communities, large networks and storage systems that will even involve the individual electric cars. You need a quick step. We are dramatically slow.
PROMISES AND BRAKES
THEexhausting bureaucracy, the judicial tangle born of malfeasance but also of the difficulty in complying with the regulations, the consequent fears and the inevitable delays. Here, before the first providential measures put in place by the Government in office, the authorization process marked an average duration of seven years. Half of the processes are thus lost along the way: exhausted, then dead between stamps and paperwork. From now on, a maximum of two years will have to be punished, as the new renewables directive imposes and as the new one wants to guarantee simplification decree which puts in place some common sense measures that surely should have arrived sooner, such as the single interlocutor, the centralization of the superintendencies' examinations, the regulatory bridge for the completion of the reform of the procurement code.
All this is not and will not be enough if we fail to focus both on the priority of the objectives to be set along the way and on the corrections to be made to what has already been done (or not done). They have come from the warnings of the best experts very useful indications . Others are added. On wind power for example. It is true that our country does not offer huge opportunities for land-based wind power, which for northern European countries represents a rich energy mine. But we are in good shape, indeed very good, for offshore wind, which has so far enjoyed little attention. The Government has noticed it now. So much so that the ministry of ecological transition has formally opened the race for floating wind power technology by starting a mapping of the subjects available to carry out the projects.
An evaluation and decision process to access both national and European Union funding will arrive very soon (in the Government's intentions). All this with dutiful exorcisms: in fact, there is a bet on the birth (very rapid, in this case) of the inevitable "committees for the protection of who knows what" which will have a lot to say about the plans to place the generators in the middle of the sea . The strategy of the presumable opposition will certainly be the same as that applied to another Italian wickedness: thepreconceived opposition to waste-to-energy plants. Preconceived and very effective, evidently. So much so that in the latest government strategic plans for waste-to-energy plants little or nothing is mentioned about it, despite the fact that throughout Europe it is the solution to obtain the classic two birds with one stone: the correct and effective management of waste (in synergy of course with separate waste collection with an overall circular economy strategy) and the practically free production of a significant portion of electricity.
The technologies are mature, the environmental guarantees are assured. It would be enough to take a look at what the Danes are up to with theCopenHill model plant in the middle of Copenhagen, where nothing puffs and nothing smells while a synthetic ski slope built by whom lies on the large roof of the facility? From us Italians. To be precise from Neveplast, company in Albano Sant'Alessandro on the outskirts of Bergamo. Not with us? Such a pity.
