Controlling Energy,

the Task of The Ural Centre for Energy Efficiency

 "..YEKATERINBURG. Alternatively romanized as Ekaterinburg, is the fourth-largest city in Russia, and is located in the middle of the Eurasian continent, on the natural border of Ural mountains between Europe and Asia. It is also the administrative center of Sverdlovsk Oblast (Russian for 'federal region'). Rich in natural resources, the oblast is especially famous for metals (iron, copper, gold, platinum), minerals (asbestos, gemstones, talcum), marble and coal. It is mostly here that the bulk of Russian industry was concentrated in the 18th and 19th centuries.."

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 Humanity today, after the rise of industrial era in the past century, depends from energetic resources as never before. Actions and tools of everyone's life are mostly based on different forms of energy like electricity for mobile phones, fuel for cars, gas for heating and so on. Comforts and a certain standard of life can be provided by these, but their intensive use generates pollution and climate changes, investing all the planet, and most of these resources are not endless.     

"Everything is filled with Energy including the economic sphere, it is like blood for an organism, so it is necessary to learn how to use and organize it" said to me Dr. Valery Anufriev, Professor and Doctor of economical sciences, candidate of technical sciences, and  Director of The Ural Centre for Energy Efficiency and Environment (UCEE), when we met first time this 2013 in Russia. The UCEE (www.ucee.ru), based in Yekaterinburg, Sverdlovsk region of Russian Federation, is a dynamic company which provides consulting services in the spheres of energy efficiency and environment in Russia and abroad. Previously Energy Center of European Union, founded in 1995 by administration of Yekaterinburg city and working in the bounds of Tacis program consortium, from 1999 it changed the name in the current UCEE.     

 Dr. Anufriev and the UCEE team, formed by a group of energy specialists, economists, environmental engineers and chemists, believe that challenges and problematics of today about Energy can be faced looking for a Green Low-Carbon Economy, through the key concept of Energy Efficiency: re-organizing the present consumption of energy, against industrial and domestic wastes (as, among their works, the audits requested by industrial plants, to switch from old equipment to new advanced technological types, improving quality, production and environment impact), and moving then towards bio-economics (bio-energetic and bio-technologic, called also 'Sixth Technology Mode') with innovative forms of energy from bio-sources (as a project now UCEE is focusing interest, the potentially innovative use of natural seaweeds or 'alga Spirulina', as new food and as source of energy).     

 I have discovered in time how the theme of Energy crosses many of my works. I believe in Energy as one 'wholeness', in and outside us, which we are part of, and which we are crossed on and off in its various expressions.. The big metaphor how to control energy, together with the urgent questions about the resources and the health of our planet, guided me in the choice of this theme and meet in my eyes the works of UCEE and of his 'family', which I had the occasion to know and having been welcomed. This is what this work aims to investigate, the story trying to tell you.

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