Alternative Sources of Energy: a Challenge for our Future

Unfortunately this week I didn't have my Exchange because I was ill at home...I'm waiting for next Monday!

Anyway, this week we had a new topic to discuss.We were supposed to search information and write about ALTERNATIVE SOURCES OF ENERGY in Italy. It was not so difficult but we had to read a lot of stuff!
Moreover, many of the sites we used are written in Italian so we had to translate and summarize things.
Obviously this exercise had also the purpose of gathering knowledge
about this issue for our Exchange program.

I think that this topic it's really interesting and extremely relevant to our present.
Surfing the Net I discovered a lot of new things also because, to say the truth, I didn't know so much about alternative sources of energy except from something concerning solar and wind energy.

During my search, I asked myself questions like :
-What are renewable sources of energy?
-Which ones are most common in Italy?
-Are there legislation or specific campaigns in order to promote their use?
I learnt that, besides solar, wind and water power, there are also Geothermal and Biomass energy.

Traditional sources of energy cause many damages to the environment and a waste of great amount of energy.
Therefore, it would be important that nowadays government fosters the use of renewables and invest more on it.
Unfortunately, there are several difficulties. First, the resistence of multinational industries and the high economic costs: in fact, non-renewable sources are less expensive.
I also discovered that in many Italian regions like Piemonte, Lombardia and Veneto there are some initiatives (they promote, for example, the transformation of wooden biomass into energy) which represent an important contribution in order to arouse people's awareness of the importance of these alternative resources for the future of our planet.

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