Italian ecological sensitivity has been finally awaken by the money smell. It’s not a hot news, but recent laws that favour investments in solar photovoltaic and thermal fields has achieved a substantial grow in public attention to this “ecological” theme. When you just drive along our industry areas you will see a bloom of brand new companies selling photovoltaic stuff. Some says that a LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) calculated on nowadays photovoltaic technologies reduce by far the overall (i.e. not strictly financial) competitiveness of such an investment,but I don’t know the technical data, so I can’t take a precise position about that. Germany was first in this run, whit respect to Italy at least, they say, but it was just an interested policy for being the “solar silicon kings”.
Well, after all, from a physic point of view, is solar PV energy worth a try? It depends, of course:
this poster (11.5MB) is a quick and visual answer to the question.
There are many other figures, at the EU Joint Research Center’s (JRC) Photovoltaic Geographical Information System (PVGIS).
All the material seems made with GRASS, the open source GIS software.