 Fifty countries are looking with keen interest at a patented Italian technology to produce electricity a natural element that has hitherto been completely ignored, even though it is the very epitome of the "power of Nature": the marine currents. And they are doing so at such an authoritative forum as the United Nations Headquarters in New York, where the Commission on Sustainable Development is in session.
The Italian technology is a turbine, called Kobold (the goblin in Germanic mythology), which was “created” several years ago by the Neapolitan ship owner, Elio Matacena, based on his observations of the propellers on his company's ferry-boats that ply across the Strait of Messina, which is known for its particularly powerful currents. This rang a bell, and Elio Matacena – a self-taught Archimedes and Chairman of a company that, almost by destiny, is called “Archimedes Bridge” – worked on the idea that the same action, appropriately adapted, could be used to convert the kinetic energy of marine currents into electricity.
Over the past four years, in the Strait of Messina, 150 metres off the coast of Ganzirri, the Strait has been joined by a brightly coloured yellow platform on which the flags of many countries flutter, in addition to the United Nations flag: it is there that the Kobold prototype is at work, generating 40 kW – sufficient to provide electricity to 13 apartments. On 27 March this year the turbine was connected to the ENEL grid which supplies electricity to the city of Messina. This project has a very interesting international background: with the support of the Development Cooperation Directorate-General at the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Kobold has made the acquaintance of... the United Nations, and more specifically, its operational arm for the industrial development of the less developed countries, UNIDO – the United Nations Industrial Development Organization – which has judged the turbine designed by “Ponte di Archimede” to be the most efficient so far invented to exploit this specific source of clean and renewable energy, and has “adopted” it for dissemination among the developing countries in which UNIDO operates. That marked the beginning of Kobold's accreditation as the ideal energy source in certain specific situations, that is to say, islands without access to a power supply and whose energy is produced by costly, and polluting, electricity generators, or even archaic oil lamps or candles. The first responses have come from three leading countries in the region: the People's Republic of China, the Philippines, and Indonesia. And it will be in the Indian Ocean Republic of Indonesia that the joint-venture is to be created, under the auspices of UNIDO, between “Ponte di Archimede” and the Indonesian Walinusa Energi corporation, which specialises in renewable energy sources. This “marriage” will produce proto… prototype of a turbine for use in Asia, designed to generate power for the electricity grid on Selayar, a non-marginal island in the Archipelagos that make up Indonesia, with a population of 700,000 people, only 25% of whom currently have access to an oil-fired electricity power station. Within two years the first turbine will be installed, marking a major breakthrough for its dissemination throughout the Island States attending the session of the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development at which the Italian Project was presented.
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