In Massa Martana in Umbria, there is strong evidence of Made in Italy innovation and high technology. In fact, it is in Massa Martana that the Angelantoni Industrie spa group has its head office, the only company in the world able to manufacture special tubes for new generation photovoltaic plants, which make it possible to heat liquids up to 550 degrees using the heat of the sun. The subsidiary Archimede Solar Energy, the group’s success story, is the division of Angelantoni involved in the business of producing solar power. It is such an innovative and interesting company that it recently attracted the attention of the multinational Siemens, which bought a 28% stake in it.

The secret of the company in Massa Martana is contained in the molten salt solar receiver tubes manufactured by Archimede Solar Energy, with which the sun’s energy is concentrated by parabolic mirrors, transformed into heat and, afterwards, into electricity. The system makes use of the old burning mirrors principle, devised for the first time by Archimedes, the scientist from Syracuse who died in 212 BC. This is an old idea which, however, required the skill of Italian technicians to be put into practice. This has opened the way for the large scale production of new generation solar power using the burning mirrors principle. The first power station of this type should open next spring with Enea and Enel in Priolo, in the same part of Syracuse where Archimedes devised the scientific principle of burning mirrors. At the same time, a small plant will also be built in Umbria.

The Angelantoni group was founded in the 1930s to manufacture refrigeration equipment, such as cold rooms. It then branched out into environmental simulation test chambers, cells in which extreme conditions are reproduced: salt spray, Arctic cold, Saharan heat, the vacuum of space. At the moment, satellite constructors (Nasa included) are queuing up at Angelantoni to simulate the behaviour of equipment that is about to go into orbit. The Umbrian company then developed the technology to deposit – using a total vacuum – layers of special compounds on surfaces to be recovered. It has worked with Enea and Enel to ensure that the reflected and concentrated heat of the sun coming from rows of mirrors is not dispersed. This is possible due to the surface of the black tubes through which the liquid to be heated flows: the special steel is covered by a very thin film of ceramic and metallic materials. This technology will make it possible to build concentrated power stations comprised of rows of mirrors that concentrate the sun’s heat. Spain and the United States already have several power stations of this type, but they do not exceed temperatures of a few hundred degrees, whereas Italian technology makes it possible to go up to about 550 degrees, the temperature of conventional power stations.