Share of electric energy consumption by the industrial sector in Italy in 2009 (click to enlarge)
Comparing the demand for electricity with the growth in the economy, for example, is one of the possible methods employed to identify the size of the ‘informal sector’, so I guess this indicator is a good one to assess how our industry is performing, and also where it is headed. I believe some adjustments should be made to the above figures to allow for things like higher energy efficiency, for example, assuming that something like that has indeed happened in Italy in the past ten years. Nonetheless, the industrial sector has lost 10 percentage points in its share of consumption, vs. everything else. An indicator, as far as I understand, of the dismantling of our manufacturing sector, if anyone still had any doubt about the fact that this was going on.
