Turin Council Meeting

In 2006, the blog collected your suggestions for a new development model for the country by means of the “Citizen Primaries”. Tens of thousands of people took part. The proposals were summarised in a document that I personally carried to our former employee Prodi, who was then President of the Council. The text of “Citizen Primaries” is still current for many aspects and in part it can represent the basis for an open discussion for the Five Star towns. The aim is to arrive at the occasion of 8 March in Florence with a Reference programme and an extract of that in “The Charter of Florence”.
The five stars correspond to the five specific areas: Water, Energy, Development, Environment and Transport. Today I am publishing the part that relates to Energy about the production of energy and the heating of the environment. Send in your thoughts on this via the comments.

THERMO-ELECTRIC PRODUCTION
The average yield of Enel’s thermo-electric generating stations is about 38%. The standard used for the construction of new generation generating stations using combined cycles is 55 to 60%. The widespread cogeneration of electrical energy and heat, with the use of the heat at the location of production and the distance transportation of the electrical energy, allows for the use of the energy potential of the combustible up to 97%. The current inefficiencies and the waste in thermo-electric production are not acceptable, not from a technological viewpoint, nor an economic one, nor a moral one. This is considering the devastating effects on the environment, and because it accelerates the using up of the fossil fuel resources. What’s needed is:
- increase in potential of the existing thermo-electric generating stations and the reduction of their environmental impact
- the provision of incentives for the distributed production of electrical energy with technologies that use fossil fuels in the most efficient ways, like the widespread co-generation of electrical energy and heat, starting from the buildings that devour the most energy: hospitals, shopping centres, industries that use technological energy, sports centres

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