More than 500 municipalities in Italy utilising geothermal energy for heating and cooling
Landscape at Crotone, Calabria, Italy (source: flickr/ Revolweb, creative commons)
Alexander Richter
22 May 2016
More than 500 municipalities in Italy are utilising today geothermal energy for heating and cooling.
Italy is seeing a remarkable growth in renewable energy utilisation over the past ten years. From around 15% ten years ago, renewable energy now represents about 36% of energy consumption in Italy.
As reported by Eco Business, “thirty-nine Italian municipalities are now meeting 100 per cent of their energy demands with renewable energy, proving that it is fully possible in this type of climate for urban areas to completely decarbonise and provide cheap energy for citizens and businesses.”
The success can be mostly credited to a “distributed production model with the addition of over 850,000 generation plants all over the country.”
While technologies like solar PV, solar thermal, wind, hydro power and bioenergy play an important role, it is interesting to see the impact of geothermal energy.
With geothermal power generation, Italy is one of the leading countries today in the utilisation of geothermal energy, but geothermal also sees a utilisation beyond power generation.
Today, 535 municipalities in Italy make use of geothermal energy with a capacity of 233 MW thermal for heating and 3.4 MW thermal for cooling.
Source: Eco-Business
