The renewable energy sector in the African continent is becoming increasingly attractive for international institutions and players interested in contributing to the green transition process.
Even Italy, which has great strategic interest for this territory, has put in place initiatives and projects aimed at contributing to the green transition of the continent: “La Sapienza” University of Rome, directed by Professor Maurizio Vichi, publishing company Internationalia and Andersen Italy have recently entered into a scientific collaboration agreement in the field of renewable energy.
The project, called “AIgreet: using Artificial Intelligence to support Green investments for promoting the Ecological Transition“, will launch a research activity aimed at developing an automated artificial intelligence system.
The innovative tool will be able to verify which institutions and countries are financing initiatives for the realization of renewable energy production and distribution plants, the beneficiary countries and the evolution over time of the projects.
“The implementation of the project – emphasizes Umberto Ferraro Petrillo, scientific manager of the initiative for La Sapienza – will require the development of algorithms that allow the collection and analysis of data relating to funds allocated by major international, multilateral and national financial institutions for the development of renewable energy on a local and global scale within the African continent”.
To support the team of the Department of Statistical Sciences, a new full-time researcher will be hired to work on the AIgreet project for the next three years.
In addition, for what concerns data analysis, La Sapienza’s Department of Statistical Sciences use Terastat2, the supercomputing infrastructure “able to reduce the considerable processing times required, allowing the analysis of data to be completed quickly thanks to the concomitant use of thousands of processors,” as explained by Ferraro Petrillo.
The decision that led to choosing the African continent as the target of the project was prompted by the latest statistics, which show a considerable increase in energy demand – almost twice as high as the global average – and which has attracted in recent years over 35 billion dollars in investments in green technologies.
Italian companies attracted by the African renewable energy market are, however, disadvantaged by the lack of information, in addition to the dispersion of funding opportunities or subsidies for the implementation of green technologies offered by governments or local institutions, as well as the plurality of entities in charge of promoting its implementation.
Precisely for this reason, the project was designed to address the problems that characterize the African sector, with the aim of rediscovering its potential through the union of an Italian excellence such as La Sapienza, a player specialized in the field of information as Internationalia and with the help of Andersen Italy’s professionals.
“Our final objective, said Gianfranco Belgrano, editor of Internationalia – is to make available to Italian companies and institutions data and analysis useful to the efforts made by the country in terms of internationalization in the renewable sector, a sector in which Italy plays an important role and that will occupy an increasingly important place for the protection of the environment”.
