Solar & Wind Energy Potential in Spain
Solar Energy in Spain
Solar energy is a renewable resource with great potential and minimal environmental impact. It’s inexhaustible on a human scale and is not subject to daily and seasonal cycles. Spain, with its high degree of solar irradiance, can significantly increase solar energy production. The wealthiest areas for solar energy are the Mediterranean coastline, the southern plateau, and Andalusia.
Wind Energy
Wind energy, produced by wind, has been used since ancient times to power boats, pump water, and grind grain. Because the wind blows intermittently and randomly in all regions, its use and application are hindered.
The Technological Challenge: Information
Industrial society is based on a digital world where information technologies are at the core of this revolution. Knowledge becomes key to increasing productivity. The multiplier of a technology is the number of times that technology can improve the objective for which it was built. The distinguishing feature of new information technologies (telecommunications and computing) is a multiplier factor of a billion. If the automotive industry had evolved as the field of computer and telecommunication services has, we could have luxury cars for very little money.
A Technological Revolution
Information technologies are based on a new unified communication code: the digital system unit. The new information unit is the bit. Information technologies produce a convergence of technology; different forms of communication are integrated into one system. For example, today, we can watch television or make phone calls via the internet.
Consequences of this Technological Revolution
Applying the new technology, it costs the same to send an email to the next town as it does to the other side of the world. Currently, a concentration of economic power is observed in the owners of those companies that know how to utilize these new technologies. Business is too big for small things and too small for big things. While business is almost infinite and very dynamic, the state is not. Therefore, mismatches are produced between the scale and manner in which the state functions and the mode of the economic system.
The Challenges of New Forms of Work and Employment
Currently, the labor situation is uncertain for many workers, and unemployment is a social phenomenon that is of great concern to the population.
The great social conquest that allowed workers to earn a living wage and a steady job in a welfare society that guaranteed pensions, medical care, and retirement is entering a crisis. This is due to changes in the overall economic system, particularly affecting the industrial sector, which currently generates more unemployment. This is structural unemployment, as opposed to temporary unemployment, which is small and due to periodic crises.
Structural unemployment is due to the new model of industrial production. Labor that is out of industrial work will hardly be able to adapt to new forms of production. Hence, the most striking group is the industrially unemployed, particularly those under 45.
New Ways of Working
Today, industry is robotic, and manual labor is intended for the design and control of production processes. Workers will have to learn to do less manual work and more intellectual work, to understand and use large amounts of information. In the next few years, people capable of planning processes, problem-solving, and training will be needed. This process requires a very high and different level of information than what was necessary twenty, thirty, or forty years ago.
Companies are more competitive when, for the same price, they can offer more quality, and this is achieved in part by better-prepared workers. Therefore, an increased level of education and personal qualities (responsibility, autonomy, initiative, and communication skills) are required.