Italy's solar drive

opportunity:energy

Many people would be surprised to learn that Italy was the first country in the world to build motorways. In fact, the A8 “Milano-Laghi” motorway (“Milan-Lakes”, as it connects the city of Milan to Lake Como and Maggiore) was completed in 1926. These days, all developed nations boast wide motorway networks, a strategic infrastructure that helps to connect people and places and facilitates trade and is ultimately essential to economic growth. Italy, meanwhile, is about to claim a new “first”: The A18 Catania-Siracusa motorway – a 30km addition to Sicily's 600km motorway network, that will be fully solar-powered, the first of its kind.

Work is well underway to complete the cutting edge infrastructure, which will be the most advanced motorway in Europe, including control systems, surveillance apparatus, tarmac quality, safety features (one of its new tunnels has also been awarded for its levels of safety).

Construction of the motorway is finished and a quarter of its solar photovoltaic (PV) panels were already operational by the end of September. Pizzarotti & Co., the general contractor for this project, aims at having all of them online by early December (the panels are feeding Sicily's electricity grid with clean energy even before it's used on site).

Road testing is due in November, and the Catania-Siracusa motorway is expected to open to the public on January 1, 2011. By then, 100 per cent of its electricity needs will be met by the PV panels installed along the road: 80,000 of them. Lights, tunnel fans, road signs, emergency telephones, all the services and street furniture installed on the A18 will be run using solar power.

Distributed over a surface of 20 hectares, the PV array was constructed using three tunnels on a 100m wide, 2.8km long stretch of road, a project with an overall cost of €60 milion. Annual solar electricity production is estimated at about 12 million kWh, which will save – the contruction group claims – the equivalent of around 31,000 tonnes of oil and 10,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions every year.

The Catania-Siracusa motorway is one of the first European experiments where a major infrastructure and distributed power generation are integrated in one design, surely the first at this scale. Furthermore, all the "green areas" surrounding the project will be subject to a major environmental renovation scheme: the contractor has provided for planting thousands of trees and plants, improving existing tree lines and hedges and increasing the extension of local woods.

This is not, however, the first time renewable energy and sustainability have been made key parts of a road project in Italy. In the last few months, still in Sicily, solar panels for a total of 368 kWp where installed along the A20 Messina-Palermo: they now provide electricity for all the buildings located along the 183km motorway. A thousand kilometres away in northern Italy, the A22 Brennero motorway (which crosses the Alps towards Austria) saw the installation of a soundproofing barrier along a residential area of the motorway route. The 1km long barrier is made of solar panels able to produce some 680,000 kWh per year, thus covering 20 per cent of the local electricity needs.

But this new paradigm in energy management is not being pursued just on isolated schemes: a further and more meaningful example of this shift in Italy's infrastructure design approach is witnessed through the widespread implementation of LED road lights and PV car park shelters being rolled out in all Italian motorways by Autostrade per l'Italia (ASPI), the leading European concessionaire for toll-motorway construction and management, with more than 3,400km of the 6,500km long Italian motorway network.

In fact, Autostrade per l'Italia launched a series of initiatives to promote the use of renewable sources for the production of electricity and improvement of energy efficiency in its buildings and infrastructure. The plan provides for production of electricity from renewable sources, energy saving measures for tunnels and service area lighting, replacement of heating and air conditioning systems with high-efficiency plants, use of geothermal energy to produce heat and electricity and tri-generation (production of electrical, heating and cooling energy) in the main office buildings, and finally a “passive” improvement at their headquarter buildings in Rome and Florence and outlying structures (section departments, maintenance points, snow point).

These actions will result in a reduction of CO2 emissions of about 40 per cent and substantial savings in maintenance costs. In 2009, 6,378 lighting fixtures were replaced, while for 2010 the installation program counts a further 10,766 LED units, reaching approximately 50 per cent of the total. An extended program for the construction of 100 photovoltaic generation sites is also being completed this year: a first phase provided for the installation of patented PV sun-shading shelters at 87 service areas (for a total of 4MWp), while phase two involves design and construction of several PV sites, ranging from 200kWp to 1MWp (a mix of stand-alone and integrated modules), adding a further 3MWp.

With Italy's solar energy boom now invigorated by the renewed feed-in tariff scheme “Conto Energia”, which gained the country enormous investments and the second position in the global PV market (with a projected 1,500MW installed capacity in 2010 alone), energy efficiency-driven design is finally making its way to mainstream thinking.

Carlo Ombello writes about sustainability and renewable energy technology. This article first appeared on his blog opportunity:energy, and was reproduced with permission.