Energy transition, an opportunity for development

Never as now our planet has offered us at the same time a ringing alarm signal and the opportunity for a new season of progress, knowledge, alliances, development and therefore business. The energy transition is not only an obligation dictated by a planet put under pressure by the climate effect and by the now clear unsustainability of a development model still entrusted preponderantly to fossil sources. The paradigm of the transition challenges us. It dictates obligations, rules, limits. It demands the development of renewables in harmony with the race to energy efficiency, it proposes to us a technological challenge that imposes in any case a quite long period of cohabitation between the “old” and the “new” energy, which must operate in synergy to pass on the baton with progression but with sufficient rapidity.

In all this there is, in fact, a new business model. Which does not mean, as many people with little attention predicted, a redefinition of the economic model marked by a necessary lowering of consumption, with the consequent danger of increasing recessive pressures. Exactly the opposite can happen, and is happening. The ecosystem of the new energy challenge opens the doors to research, to science, and with them to the industry of the new. Does it work? Yes. Also, and in some cases above all, in our country, which does indeed pay the price in many international prosperity indicators but is playing a not inconsiderable role precisely in the challenge not only of technologies but also of legislation in support of the energy transition.

What do we do and above all what more can we do not only to contribute to freeing the planet from environmental doom, but also to transform the challenge into an occasion for new development? How can we fine tune the instruments already in place and introduce new ones? Many answers will arrive from the “States General of the Italian Energy Transition” which, on the initiative of Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, Snam and Terna, gather together on 16 and 17 October in Rome prominent figures in the transversal worlds that characterise the challenge: business, finance, science, politics. On the stage there are Alessandro Tonetti and Luca D'Agnese, respectively deputy general manager and Infrastructures, PA and Territory manager of CDP; Marco Alverà, CEO of Snam together with the chairman Luca Dal Fabbro; Luigi Ferraris, CEO and General Manager of Terna together with the chairwoman Catia Bastioli. All accompanied by the strategic staffs of their groups.

For the government there are the Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte together with Deputy Minister of the Economy and Finance Laura Castelli and Undersecretary of the Ministry of Economic Development Alessandra Todde. The parliamentary commissions have their qualified representation, as the world of the regulators and of the large Italian scientific and energy institutions, starting from the chairman of ARERA Stefano Besseghini and the chairman of the ENEA Federico Testa. There is no lack of analysts and experts of international standing.

Much really depends on the new network of alliances among different but adjacent worlds and technologies. The keys to success are cooperation and synergy. Industry and research, public and private. Much can be created, based on certain key factors. In the challenge of the transition here is the leading role of large electrical infrastructures: they are called upon to support the difficult amalgamation between diffused generation, the solution of the problems of discontinuity of renewable energies, the growing needs of an electrification that is quite rightly affecting also our personal mobility. The networks become intelligent, embrace the more advanced processes of digitalisation and of artificial intelligence as is reflected in the latest strategic plan of Terna, the Italian transmission system operator (TSO).

And let’s consider the role of gas: in Snam’s strategy there emerges a growing attention to hydrogen, one of the new energy frontiers, among the privileged vectors for using the energy produced by renewables as well as possible. Snam is promoting its creation from green sources, mixes it physically with the gas that it brings to all of us, with experimentation that promises to become a structural practice.

Nuggets (not a few) of progress, of which our country can be proud. And they are part of a national and international context to which this week’s conference will reserve a detailed examination, precisely to fine tune the strategies as well as possible.

The acceleration of the large global trends is the first factor that needs to be taken into account: the shift of the energy axis of the large economies made by America and Europe to south-east Asia, the expansion of the developing countries that projects into the large markets that billion of people that still today have no access to electricity, the growing need for resources dictated by population growth. The energy transition must not only reduce the pressure on the environment but must in any case give more, and better, to everyone. Taking into account that the challenge is really impressive if we think that despite the constant improvement in the last few years in the carbon intensity of GDP at the global level, with a contraction of more than 35% from 1990 to today, CO2 emissions have not stopped growing, recording in 2018 a record of almost 33 billion tonnes, owing to the continual increase in consumption of fossil fuels despite the significant increase in recourse to renewables.

The analysts draw up predictive scenarios, using the usual techniques of experts on the subject. The BAU - Business As Usual - scenario, that is what will happen if we do nothing to correct things: disaster. Then an intermediate scenario, which shifts the burden of the real rescue to future generations. And then that which inverts the spiral and maybe really transforms the challenge into a new season of development of the economy and society at the global level. At the conference these topics, already contained in the bi-annual document of Description of the Scenarios of Terna and Snam, will be examined in depth by a technical panel.

The operating benchmark remains the Paris Agreement of 2015 which although it was ratified by 185 countries is substantially unobserved, as we well know, by many giants that risk thwarting the scope of the “ultimatum” and commitment to limit the average increase in temperatures to well below 2 degrees with respect to pre-industrial levels. A necessary objective but in all probability not a solution, given that the international scientific community assigns a probability of success of no more than 66% in the task of making reversible the rise in the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Calling all the parties involved to a new alliance also with a view to the business of development seems therefore the only strategy really worthy of a prediction.

Coherent and far-sighted is the “European Clean Energy Package” finalised by the EU with a system of rules that seems to respond organically to all five requisites at the base of the challenge: energy security, development of the domestic market, greater efficiency in the use of energy, decarbonisation, an impulse to research, promotion of innovation and competitiveness. Towards three targets to be achieved by 2030: at least a 40% reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases with respect to 1990, recourse to renewables for at least 32% of final energy consumption, and not least an improvement in energy efficiency which enables, without depressing the ability to satisfy the demand, a reduction of at least 32.5% in primary energy consumption with respect to the anticipated scenario. Practicable objectives? Yes, the experts tell us.