Italian Research Projects for Energy Efficiency

The American President Obama has launched his Green New Deal directed to reduce CO2 emissions starting from relevant interventions in car industry: the aim is the development and production of new car generations with low emission and low fuel consumption.

Nothing similar in Italy. Italian car industry is rather claiming for State aids to support the production of conventional cars showing again its myopia in terms of innovation, environment and health protection.

President Obama has also asserted that any policy directed to a renewal and restructuring of the american productive base can be achieved only thanks to the support of scientific research: it means generating innovation, advanced technological products and servcies, competitiveness, high skilled job opportunities.

The link between scientific research and production in Italy is extremely underestimated or ignored. Italian politicians have always considered this link as a low profile issue! Nevertheless Italian Research has achieved in this field interesting results also according to a commercial point of view. This condition is confirmed by the positive evaluations many projects presented by the National Research Council of Italy (CNR) have recently obtained. Some of these projects are:

A) MICROGEN30 Project, presented by the Institute for Membrane Technologies (ITM-CNR) whose goal is the creation of a micro-generation system (30 kWel) to efficiently produce energy and heat. The project is directed also to develop an innovative membrane reactor to produce and separate particularly pure hydrogen.

B) Design and development of a new generation of low energy consumption home appliances.

C) PIACE Project for energy micro-generation at home and parallel energy generation from renewable resources. This system will be controlled by a specific software capable also to optimize temperature and energy flows also on the base of weather conditions and energy fees.