Putting the sun in common

by Silvia Musso

Every saved kWh is a given kWh, but every solar produced kWh is a kWh less took away from the community.
With this awareness in 2006 the Italian cultural association Luce&Vitaenergia was born. It is aimed to produce green eletric energy to safeguard the environment and to reduce the social unjustice with the help of citizens, businesses and institutions. To reach this task the collective project FREE (Photovoltaic for Eco and Equal Research) started up. Every citizen can adopt at 30 Euro a small square of photovoltaic municipal plant built on a school building. The plants Luce&Vitaenergia will adopt, enter in a “network of phovoltaic plants for the solidarity among peoples” and in agreement with the involved Municipality, every piece of photovoltaic adopted surface will produce an economic earn to completely devolve to the realization of small photovoltaic plants in rural villages without electricity to guarantee enough energy for schools, First Aid structures and the producing of drinkable water.

The FREE project began with the Municipality of Medicina (Province of Bologna, central Italy) where the adoption of the plant on the Zanardi primary school will permit the realization of three smal plants to give electricity to three African schools: one in Ghana and two in Tanzania.
The school has a fundamental role in the FREE project because it becomes the common plce where trying to involve the students in a project that must be their own project: their plant, payed by them, for their solidarity project. «The purpose – claims Leonardo Setti, one of the founders of the association and professor at the University of Bologna – is to let the students to face the energy problem that isn't just technological, but it is a question of access: someone can consume all the energy they want and someone else is not able even to switch a light bulb on. As long as our children don't learn to see the energy as a problem of resources access, they won't become adults aware that the energy saving is an imperative value to share. Indeed, if someone consumes to much, there's someone that can't consume».

Nearby to this project there's another one, the TOZEROENERGY: a businesses can compensate the energy used to make a product and, for every sold product, adopt a small piece of a municipal photovoltaic plant built on school.
The TOZEROENERGY project started with the book by Helen Caldicott “Il Nucleare non è la Risposta” (The Nuclear is not the answer” edited by Gammarò Editori. Setti again:
«The association was born to manage the FREE project, to gve the citizens the possibility to adopt photovoltaic pieces, but in these last years we have realized that many firms were interested to the project and contributed to the adoption. For this reason one year ago we began to think about te development of a project dedicated to businesses, that was alternative to the compensation of greenhouse emissions throughout the trees' planting. So the idea of a unique project for the energy compensation was born. The firm can participate to the adoption making its production sustainable and to contribute to create solidarity».

The association projects aimed to create an international and intercultural network, are not followed by a real communication strategy. Or it's better to say that the good actions themselves of virtuous municipalities, schools and firms become channels to transmit environmental messages. What better educational strategy than the creation of a sense of responsibility among students and citizens throughout their direct involvement, putting, as Setti likes to claim, the “sun in common”? With FREE the solar energy has become a recourse for the municipality (“comune” in Italian, word written in the same way than common), but has also been put at disposal of the citizenship, as a sharable resource.