New Technologies for Sustainable Energy in the Smart City: the WET Theory

The paper tries to develop a new approach to the sustainable planning for the smart city based on the assumption that the relationship between new technologies and urban system could be developed in a new way considering the WET theory. The WET theory starts from the main components for the establishment and the survival of the human settlements: Water, Energy and Technologies (WET). By Considering this approach, technology could be envisaged as a switch element for the bifurcation that could be generated inside the process of management of the modern urban systems. On the one hand, technology can improve the use of renewable energies and it can promote a different way of using energy inside the city. On the other hand, technology can produce a huge structural work that can drive the urban system towards a worst dimension, by causing permanent change inside the territory as a whole, particularly at large scale. Starting from these considerations, the paper proposes a focus on the two mentioned possibilities, by considering the best dimension, represented by the DESERTEC project and the worst one prefigured by the South to North Water Diversion Project (SNWDP) that is going to start in China.