Energies for Europe - Local Training Tools for European Internal Market

It is necessary to remember what Roberto Galullo reported in his presentation of the series “Local self-government” at il Sole –24 Ore :
“The State government, in the last few years, is shifting its barycentre from the centre (Central State) to the periphery (local and territorial administrations).
A law issued in 1993 - the one on the direct election of the mayor and the president of the Province,– has lit the fuse of a revolution in local government that, even with a thousand difficulties and contradictions, is now spreading in local administrations.
Another handful of laws – the one on the direct election of the president of the Region and those which went down in present-day history as “Bassanini reforms” – gave new instruments and a new strength to that revolution which, more than being in the way of administrating and governing, is first of all cultural.
Other laws at last- the first which introduced Ici, the last ones, which introduced Irap and disciplined the co-participation of Regions to Iva – are shifting in the periphery the axis of taxation, a fundamental premise for a new relationship with the administered collectives.
During ten years, therefore – especially with the recent reform of the title V of the Constitution which is waiting to be implemented and waiting for a new federalist reform which will be carried out by the new Parliament – the State is being stripped of its functions, duties and activities in order to transfer them to Regions and local administrations.
This huge shift of responsibilities, this heavy change of political witness , gave a strong shake to Regions and Provinces, but mainly to Municipalities, the government form closer to the people…This process of “ administrative federalism” is not painless: administrators are summoned to make more and more complex and dangerous choices; the local administrations staff are summoned to manage those directions, often without parachute; citizens and enterprises, at last, are summoned to judge the effects of those political choices and of that administrative management.

Borrowing from the vice editor-in-chief of Il Sole-24 Ore the newspaper style, concise but effective, through which he has successfully described the process of administrative decentralisation operative in Italy, we could add that the directive 96/92/EC, concerning common rules for the internal market in electricity – transposed in the national legislation with the decree no. 79 of 16 March 1999 – has lit the fuse of a revolution in the electricity sector which, even with a thousand difficulties and contradictions, is consolidating a new trim to the sector in order to strengthen in the meantime the security of energy purchasing and competitiveness of European economy in respect to environment.

The combined impulse of the two revolutions above mentioned, makes the Province of Chieti, thanks to the international experience acquired in the previous European projects and to the capacities grown inside the Local Agency for Energies and environmental development , feel the necessity to provide for itself a training instrument, addressed first of all to its officers in order to be able to manage the profound changes occurring in the new born internal market for energies.

The opportunity of a call for tender within the community program “Leonardo Da Vinci” has done the rest; proceeding bottom-up and inside the constraints imposed by the call for tender, it was decided the constitution of a partnership that would ensure first of all the required capacities to face the peculiar issues of the sector in question, choosing to limit at first the training object to the internal energy market, but also in proportion to its more advanced state of maturity at a European level in comparison to that of natural gas. The new capacities acquired have then produced the extension of the public target of the training package, besides to the officers of the local and regional techno-structures and of local administrations, to secondary school and university students, especially to those students attending the last year of sectoral and technical schools and of university courses in energetics and environmental engineering, to people responsible for a rational use of energy (energy manager) appointed in Italy in compliance with the obligations ex art. 19 of the law of 9 January 1991 no. 10; at last, even if with minor ambitions, to the old and new actors of the market. At the international level, the partners’ choice, at a rate of the experience and diversity of the internal markets that are about to be set up, has been made on the Portugal National Agency for Energy and on the Spanish of the Ayuntamiento of Ecija and Alcoucer Consultores, already partners of Chieti in some previous European project initiatives that, in collaboration with the Andalusa Sodean Agency and the Consejera de Education de la Junta de Andalusia, shared in primis the training exigencies above-mentioned. These qualified attendants caused a further ambition in the partners of the project: that of operating a comparison among the three new orders of the electric sector that are going to be loomed in Italy, Portugal and Spain providing a further instrument to anyone wishing to operate in the European internal market. The European organism FEDARENE whose working headquarter is in Bruxelles groups together more than 80 European agencies for Energy, has so attained the partners’ group in order to guarantee first of all the wider diffusion of the product at a European level.

The career briefs and the training exigencies of an objective public so heterogeneous, represented a constraint to the project which strengthened the initial conviction of being oriented towards a global and a more specialized product , able to provide for the objective public first and foremost a whole vision of the new order of the electric sector; so the type of functional possible relationship between the new and old actors of the market and the old and new institutions called to pursue different tasks. At last, a product that would enable to deepen some of the questions more relevant by providing in the same time a cognitive and informational basis through legislative and regulations archives, useful links to institutional sites not already existent, exhaustive answers to recurring issues of the different components of the public target.
Another relevant constraint to the project is to be underlined in the dynamics of the current process for the construction and the functioning of the internal market of electricity, connected to the stability of national and European political stance, which has been and is still under discussion both for the partial results observed along the path and for a set of legitimate interests entirely or partly unfulfilled of the revolution operated in the sector.

All this caused the construction of a product not at all definitive, solidly based on a consolidated and acquired operational practice, but of a dynamic object, anchored to a basic functional scheme which is according to us hardly arguable in the next years, but open to adaptations during its execution. These adaptations will be introduced little by little in the training package together with the produced requests from the interactive returns that the public target would provide us by web surfing .

Scientific Manager of project
Ing. Dario Chello

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