
See Savona, and keep going local
Dear friends,
After a trip through the beautiful Swiss countryside, we arrived in Italy: Milan first, Arenzano and then finally Savona. A big thank you to Laurent and his father for your help with the tent! The Tournesol team is going back to the roots with a couple of days under the stars.
But the purpose of our visit was as exciting as the beautiful surroundings, we were invited to the University Campus of Savona (branch of the University of Genoa) to meet with Pr. Alberto Traverso and Dr. Stefano Barberis of the Power engineering department. The team of Pr. Traverso is managing the campus wide micro-grid, and testing production management methodology. The facilities of the university branch are used as a micro smart grid that is managed to provides electricity and heat energy to the whole campus. The installations that were sponsored by the Italian government at the beginning, was then enriched by Siemens and managed by a team paid by the Resilient project.
Our meeting with the two professor was especially interesting because we were able to understand better, not only the system they implemented, by also the financing mechanism of such projects. Stefano especially told us about the reason why most of the research projects in Italy are financed via the European union, because of the lack of local funding. Today Italian firms are dominating the program building in Europe.
After this great meeting, we said goodbye to the sunny Savona, to get back on the road direction San Sebastian, and the general Assembly of the cooperative federation of Europe: RESCOOP.