Italienische Reise
Crossing into Italy’s power system
I am preparing to travel to Italy for a one-week holiday starting Friday: a train to Bologna, a short stay there, then on to Perugia for a longer stay, before returning to Munich via Verona.
This trip will be the starting point for a new category of essays that aims to expand our energy horizons. We have previously explored aspects of energy systems beyond Germany, and beyond Europe, but not consistently. In particular, our data-derived explorations have all focused on Germany.
From here on in, let us treat travel as a way of investigating the energy systems in the places to which we travel: exploring associations, questions, and the data available to develop our “energy journey.” Travel becomes a way of expanding our “data model” in a meaningful way.
This post sets the scene by linking reflections on the upcoming journey with material that may help in studying an energy system about which I currently know almost nothing.
A good starting point for the present market structure is GME’s Vademecum to the Electricity Market: https://www.mercatoelettrico.org/Portals/0/Documents/en-us/20250101VademecumBorsaElettrica_En.pdf. IEA’s Italy 2023 Energy Policy Review places Italy’s dependence on imported fossil fuels, the centrality of gas, the need for more flexibility and grids, and the challenge of integrating more renewables into one coherent frame. See https://www.iea.org/reports/italy-2023. Alongside that we could read Paolo Malanima’s historical work on Italian energy consumption, reminding one that present dependencies are layered on long historical changes in fuel, industrialisation, and infrastructure rather than dropping from nowhere. https://histecon.fas.harvard.edu/energyhistory/data/Malanima_Energy%20Consumption%20Italy.pdf.
A trip from Germany to Italy and back is, I feel, perfectly suited to launch cross-border energy explorations. Germans have always loved Italy, a country that has long represented many of the things missing from daily more ‘northern’ life. Might some version of that attraction extend even to Italy’s energy system?
While Germany searches, somewhat awkwardly one might say, for ways to address the internal tensions concealed beneath the abstraction of its large bidding zone, Italy may show the issue in a more candid form. Since 1 January 2021, it has operated with a seven-zone configuration, and Terna’s explainer notes explicitly that Umbria was moved from Centre-North to Centre-South in that redesign.
Bologna and Verona are in NORD; Perugia (Umbria) is in CSUD. So the middle of the trip is not just a pleasant movement from one city to another. It is a crossing inside the market itself. Terna’s explainer is here: https://lightbox.terna.it/en/insight/new-electricity-market-zones and the official GME zone document is here: https://www.mercatoelettrico.org/Portals/0/Documents/it-IT/20231018_ME_Zone.pdf
Might thoughts of Italy incite German Sehnsucht for more candid connection between internal tension and overall design?
