0000000001113601
AUTHOR
Alessandro Campiotti
Innovation for the Italian agricultural and food industry sector
The food industry is one of the largest energy consumers in the world, with 95 EJ/year. In this context, in Europe the amount of energy needed to cultivate, process, package and bring food to the homes of citizens reached 285 Mtoe in 2015, of which 14 Mtoe due to the Italian agricultural and food system. With the aim of favoring a drastic reduction in energy consumption, the European Commission, and the main international agencies, ie: FAO, OECD, UN over the last decade have aligned on the need to develop policies to support energy efficiency, renewable energies and sustainable technologies in order to minimize the use of fossil fuels and to reduce the final energy consumption, especially i…
Energy consumption and improvement of energy efficiency for the European agricultural-food system
This work addresses the subjects of reducing fossil energy consumption and the interventions to improve energy efficiency in the European agricultural-food sys-tem. Following an overview on both such subjects, the results of European projects TESLA and SCOoPE are also analysed with attention to best practices and technologies available to improve energy efficiency in order to reduce the fossil energy use in agri-food systems of Mediterranean countries. A list of Key Performance Indicators for the fruit and vegetable sector, useful for comparative analyses aimed at selecting best methods of energy management and technologies for improving energy efficiency, is reported. Finally, a brief focu…