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Gender and sustainability are joined by twisting together in a logic and consequent way that only in the recent years has been commonly valorized. On the contrary, in the previous so-cieties it seemed that the process of economic and social development was counterposed to the female identities and roles and today the cultural inheritance is the identification of the gender as a discriminating factor for female and the other gender identities as those of the most vulnerable actors, together with young and old people. Nevertheless, as mentioned before, there is an institutional national and supranational acknowledgment and a growing common awareness on the necessity of the gender equality for the economic, social and cul-tural development, even defined in the UN 2030 Agenda Sustainable Development Goals. The outcomes of the exploration of the positive and negative dimensions of the gender im-plications for the development will be analysed in the perspective of the current definition of a new paradigm: its basic claim is that a stable economic growth and inclusive societies could be only if the female rights are protected and promoted.

This report provides an overview of the state of the art of smart grids in Italy and pinpoints the factors conditioning their development and application in our country, while providing the overall scenario and perspective regarding Europe and world wide. It identifies the main actors concerning industry, applications and research & development, provides an outline of the main Italian smart grid projects, and discusses drivers and barriers to wider adoption in Italy. The report includes three parts. The first part gives a conceptual definition of smart grids and points out the main economic and technical factors driving or conditioning their adoption within the context of present-day electric system. It is shown that there exist many different views of what a smart grid and, starting from that, it reaches its own synthetic definition; 'a smart grid delivers electricity from generators to end users by making use of ICT in such a way as to spare energy, reduce costs, increase reliability and transparency of the power system. Smart grids contribute to energy independency, decrease global warming and increase system security'. This way smart grids couple online monitoring, control and optimization capabilities to power transmission and distribution, in such a way as to achieve optimum efficiency and reduce global warming. Based on that definition, the report discusses the main features of smart grids: distributed power generation and energy storage, reduced environmental impact and network control issues. Drivers and barriers for further development and wider adoption include market pressure, end user behaviors and expectations, power system ageing and its current regulatory framework on one side, and enabling technologies on the other: information, communication and control, new materials, energy storage, power electronics and distributed generation. The second part focuses on relevant research & development projects. The chapter shows how the smart grid concept was born, its story and the overall related research & development in Europe and Italy. The smart grid concept was born in the USA based on seminal research at EPRI. Since the beginning, the US concept stresses on system security, because the US power system is both more vulnerable than the European one, and more likely to be the potential target for cyber wars. The term smart grids was introduced by the paper 'Toward A Smart Grid' by S. Massoud Amin and Bruce F. Wollenberg, published by the IEEE Power & Energy Magazine, September/October 2005. The CIN/SI project lead by Massoud Amin at EPRI until 2003 had a seminal role in defining the intelligent interactive power network concept, although the main standpoints for developing this concept date back to two technical phenomena late in the eighties and nineties of last century: o widespread diffusion of power systems controls and especially the emergence of intelligent metering systems; o emergency of distributed power generation and the drive to wider adoption of renewables which are distributed by their nature. The European counterpart of the CIN/SI project is the European Technology Platform for the Electricity Networks of the Future, established December 2004: this groups the key industrial stakeholders and the research community and provides a vision for EU research in the area as summarised in this report, together with the key EU projects which gave background to the platform, and an overview of current major application projects: some of them will have substantial impact on the future European power system. The European vision is compared with the US one, where system security aspects prevail and there is stronger emphasis on application. Finally, based on a six layer functional model provided by the European Electricity Grid Initiative, we provide an overview of the current key R&D themes in Europe. 6 Rapporto Tecnico, Anno 6, n° 36; febbraio 2011 The report presents the main innovation players in Italy: utilities, among them Enel plays a key role together with ACEA, A2A, CIE, Edison, Eni, IREN and Sorgenia, and the key R&D centres: CNR, Enea and RSE. The views of these players are summarised in the report, as gathered through interviews with their representatives. The report provides an overview of the key R&D projects in Italy. In the main Enel appears to be the key player concerning innovation and development in this area. This brings about a first comer power as far as technology standards and innovation dynamics are concerned. At the same time, Enel is the prime mover, and makes possible continuous development of the Italian power system, among the most advanced worldwide. As far as distribution is concerned, remote metering systems were widespread by Enel since the late nineties based on a company investment. In 2006 the Italian Energy and Gas Authority recognised the advantages on the end user side and made their installation compulsory in the whole of Italy. In 2000-'01 Enel deployed another large project for remote control of the medium voltage power grid, this makes possible fault isolation within secondary power substations and makes maintenance by far more efficient. Future developments of Smart Grids are the object of the ADDRESS project grouping 25 partners among distribution utilities, R&D companies, manufacturers and ICT suppliers to the aim of enabling active demand in the context of the smart grids of the future, i.e. active participation of small and commercial consumers in power system markets and provision of services to the different power system participants. The third part of the report discusses how Smart Grids are impacting on the Italian economy: the main stakeholders are identified joint with their engagement in R&D and future application, and barriers to wider deployment are considered: how enable active demand, how to make data widely available, how to join efforts among several stakeholder categories, how stimulate investments in presence of imperfect benefit appropriation. In the main, as far as application perspectives are considered, the phase of conjecturing and scenario simulation seems to be overcome. However, the critical issues mentioned above make most stakeholders reluctant to engage in wider scale application although there are significant exceptions. While these issues may justify a cautious attitude, the fact that the Italian electric system is among the most advanced worldwide should be exploited as a competitive advantage. While the US economy is widely investing on smart grids, engagement in the European union is not far beyond, and one must take into account that considerable part of the US investments are to recover the infrastructure gap as a far as physical grids are concerned (those are older/more inadequate/more aged than the EU ones). Despite these favourable conditions, the prevailing stakeholders attitude looks over cautious because, although technology appears mature, no one wishes to engage in the first step because of the critical issues that remain to be solved, the difficulty to forecast emerging scenarios (especially cocerning standards) and the systemic nature of the technology.