In preparation of a very poorly informed referendum on nuclear energy in Italy – as usual the stakes are high and people are misguided by strong economic interest – I offer some hard facts on solar energy, cutting through mostly ideological thinking and only supposedly pro environmental stances, that hide selfishness and a huge not in my garden syndrome.
Incidentally, this very same approach has had Italy renounce a few years ago to its nuclear energy technology and know how, at huge costs to our society, both at the investment level, with the immediate foreclosure or reconversion of operating and running nuclear plants (one of them had just been finished the acceptance tests, Montalto di Castro) and variable costs, as the Italian industry imports its electric energy (20-30%) deficit from France and Switzerland, at huge additional cost and – guess what – mostly nuclear origin energy.
I will now expand on solar energy, by many rightly considered the alternative source of energy.
I will try to show that solar energy is the solution, just not now, not yet.
And that nuclear energy has a lead.
Interestingly, we should also consider the new developments into nucler fusion, a long and so far never fulfilled promise: an interesting and potentially revolutionary experiment has taken place in Italy in Bologna by Rossi and Focardi, an engineer and a University Professor last january. It is not at all suprising that the underlying technolgy is Italian, but the first experimental plant will be built in Greece.
Back to solar, its energy radiation power is able to produce approximately 1 Kw of power - a little over one horsepower – per square yard (or meter).
Average consumption for a western economy household is just approximately that: 1 kw.
Simple enough? Apparently all you need to do is add a 1 sqm panel on top of your roof.
Not quite. Solar panels are only 15% efficient, that is can only turn into consumable power 15% of sunlight yield, with advanced and most expensive panels arriving around 40%. Accounting for when the sun is not exactly overhead and for above mentioned efficiency losses, you need around 20 sqm (or sq yards) surface to power up one household.
The cost of setting up one of these roof home made solar panel farms is around 10.000€.
As the market value of one kwh however produced is approximately 12 c€ and there are 8760 hours in a year, you can easily compute the per year yield of you investments. I am not running the financial calculations (please feel free to do it, if you have some time to devote, it’s great eco-practice) but it should yield that you are (shadow) making around 500€ per year, implying a 5% Roi (Return on investiment).
This is prior to accounting for depreciation, as with an assumption of a life span for your cells of just 10 years the initiative goes negative and only breaks even around 20.
Solor energy is thus still so far uncompetitive to other sources of energy.
When you drive along the fields in Italy (Tuscany, Lazio, Puglia…) and you see solar farms when just months before all you could see was farmland, you are not witnessing a new economic miracle to the misery of the formerly beautiful scenar , but rather a new waste of public (thus your and my own) money.
It is just through the allocation of public funds and several forms of facilitation for the intitial investment (incentives on energy produced, tax breaks, lump sums, reduced cost of borrowing etc ) that these conventional farms are becoming solar farms.
As usual, whenever the State fiddles with the economy it is mostly likely to generate damage taht exeeds intended good.
We are thus witnessing a huge solar bubble, but not one of those visible with a naked shielded eye on our star as it flares, but rather an economic bubble, ready to burst. The rationale behind is the same old story of an entire industry and vertical value chain (the solar one) begging for and finding its way to our money in the Parliament.
And yet solar energy offers huge potential. When solar panel production costs and efficiency will increase by a factor (not so long away), that is when nanotechnology and nanofactoring will kick in their potential benefits in a few years, it will be the dafualt power source on the planet, fully replacing fossil fuels and making it possible to do away with speculation enhenced naiveties such as biofules and hydrogen (that costs more to extract, stock and transport it than it yields in terms of energy).
For the time being we’ll have to stick to (very unclean and environmentally unfriendly) coal at 0.4 € cent per kwh, nuclear energy at 2 € cent per kwh, natural gas at 4 € cent per kwh and gasoline at 12 € cent per kwh (all production costs not retail prices, obviously).
If in still in doubt remember that energy si the primary cause why countries go at war (enough to mention recent Gulf Wars I and II and our involvement in Lybia) and that China is energy hungry to fund its incredible growth.
Save the planet, save your wallet, save your life: vote for a return to nuclear energy.
Nepotism comes from the latin word for nephew.
It implies favouring siblings without accounting for merit when contemplating filling up positions.
Nepotism has accompanied man throughout history.
We will make the case that it is about time we questioned and objected this rather fashionable social behaviour.
Let’s start by a lesser Italian example.
“Christmas at Beverly Hills” is out in cinemas around Italy.
As usual for this type of christmas comic movies, it will be a success, both financially and in terms of public critique.
People enjoy having a good laugh, particularly at christmas, and, besides the fact that the movie is inclined towards the shallower side of the comic spectrum, it does make a pretty good job at making you have a good laugh.
So, what’s wrong?
Three of the lead actors featured in the movies carry important names from inasmany comic actors who were very popular in the 50’ and 60’.
Now, it is clear that the sons and daughters of a good comedian, who has enjoyed success in his professional life do have a advantage when it comes their time at shooting for success.
Having “breathed” comedy and cinema all their life they have a better chance ofbeing successful comedians themselves.
But they also enjoy all the family and personal relations the lacking of which has made enormously more difficult to their fathers or mothers to break the ice of success in first place.
Now, is this a good or bad thing?
I argue that it is pretty bad.
There is an advantage in medioeval and renaissance times, where labour was about (mostly) manual skills, that took a long time to apprehend.
If you were the son of a carpenter you ran a pretty good chance of being a carpenter yourself.
It was good for you and for your society at large, that was able to afford a new good carpenter when the elder carpenter retired.
Alas, we now live in a knowledge economy.
Knowledge is so specialised and is (or at least should be) so linked to your personal inclinations and talents that it makes no sense at all for a society to tolerate that the son or daughter of a well known surgeon shall necessarily be a surgeon in his or her own sake.
Of course there are always exceptions, and there are plenty of very good surgeons that have a relative who is a well known surgeon himself, with both greatly benefiting society with their skills.
Most of history musical talents happen to be the sons of musical maestros or otherwise people who were very fond or made a living with music.
Unfortunately, there is also an opportunity cost of having a surgeon that is related to another elder surgeon.
He is probably holding a position that would otherwise have belonged to someone else (assuming for the sake of the argument that the number of surgeons in need in an economy be a given).
If competition was run purely on merit, he would have full rights to be where he is.
Unfortunately for Italy and for most advanced societies (I’d be curious to know what happens in the developing world, but I am rather confident that it is pretty much the same) you owe your position to a greater and greater extent to the help of some powerful or well connected guy who has helped you “ascend” there, sometimes – as apparently in the case of a very well known lange d’oc politician and his son – without having made any explicit requests in that sense.
Again, is this good or bad?
For sure it entails two negative side effects.
First it promotes the less than perfect candidate to the post.
Economy and society benefit when we have the right guy in the right place.
Some (all?) of these positions are key to economic, political and societal development.
A bad administrator for example will not optimally allocate resources, especially if he or she has to obey some kind of family rules in the priority of the allocations.
This is probably bad for all of “his” administered people.
Any company that employs the acquaintancies, friends and relatives of former or current executives, politicians and other important and/or well connected people will usually do – without much surprise – a pretty bad job at serving the customer.
We therefore question the recent initiative at an Italian company that is discussing offering the possibility to swap a job post from one generation to the next, in in partial compensation for a request of forced early retirement.
To be more clear, if you ask me to go home, my dear company, at least you first employ my son or daughter.
At the end of the day, the rationale goes, you know me and my family well, which is supposed to be a good indicator of future employee performance.
I leave it to the reader’s judgement if that is exactly the case.
In a knowledge economy or a knowledge society, which the better explanation of our current environment, knowledge and merit should be the main (only?) cause for social promotion, if we want to build an efficient society.
It is rather human to try and pass on some benefits to your siblings, and that is probably one of the key distinctions between the capitalistic and socialistic utopias.
Private property passes on to the next generation enabling some (or all, according to which law you abide to) of your wealth to survive you.
Unfortunately, this is also the main cause for the creation of rent, that is – in other words – it enables some of the fanciful shop walking and Caribbean chartering of people who have not done any better to society than being the relatives of somebody either famous, smart or talented. Or best – and I have a female pop icon in mind here – a mix of the three.
To some extent, the promotion of your offspring – beside being again very human – is tolerable and actually favours the economy (I do my best not only to improve my condition, but also that of my offspring), but also has carry some limitations, so as to avoid rent, the ability to profit exclusively from someone else’s endeavours (such as the lead character of “About a Boy”, if you remember, who was leaving on royalties from the music of his father).
Luckily there are also some counter examples.
A few of the wealthiest individuals in the US, fully aware of the distortive power to their children of the wealth amassed, have set up foundations so as to limit the amount actually passed on to the future generation and using the rest for social or non-profit objectives.
There are organisations that enact policies to forbid employing relatives.
Some of this virtuous behaviours shall be adopted if we want to get this country off the ground.
I argue that this is the root cause of the Italian malaise, Italy’s zero growth and Italy’s zero innovation, Italy’s poor performance on any given economic and social indicator, Italy’s terrible job at providing decent services to Italian customers and citizen alike.
It is rather interesting that no public outcry or – at least – any type of public notice was made of the excellent genealogy of the three actors in the cast of the latest Christmas movie.
