Sardinia’s Renewable Energy Conflict: Identity At Stake

I’m right here to see three intriguing new power tasks beneath improvement in Sardinia. I’d heard there’s robust public resistance to renewable power, and I wish to perceive why that’s. I inform Pilo, who’s vice rector for innovation on the College of Cagliari, that I hope he’ll share some insights earlier than I head out on a reporting journey throughout the island. (My reply appears to fulfill him, and he kindly provides me an hour of his time).

This received’t be the primary time that I’m requested to clarify my presence on the island. I’d anticipated it, to some extent; I’m a overseas journalist poking round, in spite of everything.

What I didn’t count on was the depth of Sardinians’ mistrust, not simply of journalists, however of any outsider, notably ones with authority. Over the previous couple of years, builders of wind and photo voltaic tasks, most of whom aren’t from right here, have been absorbing the majority of this smoldering, communal wariness.

Activists Maria Grazia Demontis [left] and Alberto Sala, photographed contained in the archaeological monument Giants’ Tomb of Pascarédda, have labored to cease the development of wind farms by organizing protests and taking authorized actions by way of their group Gallura Coordination. Luigi Avantaggiato

In truth, the resistance is so widespread amongst Sardinians that over the course of two months in 2024, a grassroots petition to ban new wind and photo voltaic tasks gathered over 210,000 licensed signatures. That’s greater than 1 / 4 of Sardinia’s typical voter turnout and represents a cross-party consensus. Individuals stood in lengthy strains in public squares to signal. And it labored: Political leaders responded swiftly with an 18-month moratorium on renewable power building.

“I’ve by no means seen a lot engagement for something” in Sardinia, says Elisa Sotgiu, a literary sociologist on the College of Oxford, who was born and raised on the island. “Sardinia has a bunch of issues like huge unemployment. There’s plenty of emigration as a result of there are not any jobs. It’s one of many poorest areas in Europe. The world is simply decaying,” she says. “And but the factor individuals are demonstrating towards is renewable power.”

And the opposition continues: A community of mayors has mobilized for the trigger. 1000’s of individuals present up at organized protests. Activists vandalize grid tools. Households are passing down these tales of resistance to their kids as some extent of pleasure. Native media retailers are egging it on, continuously publishing misinformation tinged with fearmongering.

These aren’t simply NIMBY complaints—not within the pejorative sense, no less than. The resistance, and the mistrust underlying it, is rooted within the island’s advanced historical past, each current and historical. It’s primarily based on a previous that the Sardinian individuals carry with them—a previous that has seeded a deep sense of suspicion and vulnerability. Resistance, I study, is a part of what it means to be Sardinian.

Fabrizio Giulio Luca Pilo, vice rector of innovation on the College of Cagliari, has been working to assist Sardinia transition to cleaner, extra dependable power. Luigi Avantaggiato

“It’s a very unhappy state of affairs,” Pilo tells me. “There are loads of financial causes to do the [energy] transition.” It may appeal to new firms resembling information facilities, which might create new jobs, he argues. It may scale back Sardinia’s reliance on imported gasoline and gasoline, making the island extra unbiased. New financial exercise on the island may assist reverse its inhabitants decline, he provides.

And whereas what’s taking place on Sardinia is exclusive, it additionally represents a bigger development: A rising variety of communities world wide are opposing wind- and solar-farm building, to the consternation of stakeholders. By 2025, practically one-fourth of the counties in the USA had enacted some obstacle to new utility-scale wind and photo voltaic power—up from as few as 15 p.c two years earlier, in line with a USA Today analysis. In Africa, group pushback efficiently canceled main tasks such because the 60-megawatt Kinangop Wind Park in Kenya. In India, native pastoralists are difficult the 13-gigawatt Ladakh photo voltaic and wind mission. And the European Union’s top-down push for renewable power has created opposition in lots of communities.

Their causes differ—land-use preferences, generational ethos, authorities resentment, property values, financial results, aesthetics—however all of those struggles have this in frequent: The resisters are passionate and they’re usually profitable in blocking improvement.

This can be a looming downside for the power transition. In contrast to massive, centralized coal and nuclear power plants, renewable power is geographically unfold out, so it touches much more communities. Sardinia presents one of many clearest circumstances of what can go incorrect when renewable-energy builders and authorities fail to contemplate the complexities of the native state of affairs on the bottom.

Why is Sardinia resisting renewable power?

Roughly the scale of New Hampshire, Sardinia juts out of the Mediterranean Sea about 200 kilometers west of Italy’s mainland. Technically it’s a part of Italy, however Sardinians are fast to level out their island’s autonomous standing—a delicate approach of claiming, “We do issues our approach.” Its mountains appear to echo the sentiment. With the very best peaks working in a series alongside the east facet of the island, Sardinia resolutely turns its again to the mainland.

At first look, the island seems to be just like the sort of place that’s ripe for an power transition. Its two coal vegetation are getting old and are focused to be shut down to fulfill local weather commitments. It has no nuclear energy, nor does it produce its personal pure gasoline. Wind and solar, nonetheless, are considerable and will simply meet the power wants of Sardinia’s sparse inhabitants of about 1.5 million.

However whereas the sources could also be prepared for a transition, the individuals emphatically usually are not. After I first arrive in Sardinia and soak up its magnificence, I assume that the impetus behind the battle towards wind and photo voltaic farms boils all the way down to how they appear. Waves of silicon, steel, and concrete would spoil views of Sardinia’s gorgeous seashores, rugged mountains, historical pastures, and idyllic medieval villages, in spite of everything.

Residents of town of Orgosolo in 1969 famously stopped the development of a navy firing vary on communal grazing land often known as Pratobello. Its village partitions are nonetheless coated in murals advocating social protest and antiauthoritarianism. Luigi Avantaggiato

However the island’s aesthetic—and the tourism trade that will depend on it—are solely a part of the equation. The far stronger cultural forces at play are rooted in Sardinia’s previous. Over millennia, the island has endured successive invasions from outsiders in search of to use the land. These incursions, and Sardinians’ rebellious responses to them, have turn out to be an integral a part of the island’s id handed down by way of generations.

The invasions began with the comparatively peaceable settlement of the Phoenicians within the ninth and eighth centuries B.C.E. Then got here the Romans, the Byzantines, and the Iberians, who conquered with violence, looting, and enslavement. However legend has it that regardless of the may of those historical conquerors, pockets of Sardinia typically managed to defend themselves. “Not even the Roman empire may conquer the shepherds of the highland areas,” is the oft-repeated story. Whether or not that’s true or simply an idealization is irrelevant; such tales function an infinite supply of pleasure and id.

Sardinia exported practically 40 p.c of the electrical energy it generated in 2025, largely to Corsica and the Italian mainland by way of two present submarine cables.

The island is “fiercely happy with its id…particularly within the heart of Sardinia, which was probably the most resistant half,” says Andrea Vargiu, a sociologist on the College of Sassari in Sardinia. “This lengthy historical past of exploitation continues to be in our DNA, together with a proud sense of autonomy,” he says.

Sardinia’s unification, within the mid-1800s, with what would turn out to be the Kingdom of Italy is seen by many as an act of colonization. It didn’t assist that Italy then proceeded to use Sardinia’s forests and different sources for the good thing about the mainland—a observe that continued by way of the twentieth century, says Vargiu.

Sardinian bandits typically fought again with their very own sense of justice, settling issues by way of raids, kidnappings, and violence. Their tales stay on in Sardinian lore with an nearly legendary high quality, the brigands admired for his or her intractability.

Pasquale Mereu, mayor of Orgosolo, helped set up the Pratobello 24 motion towards renewable power in Sardinia. Luigi Avantaggiato

Italy’s use of the island for navy functions notably irked locals. In a well-known case in 1969, residents of the city of Orgosolo efficiently thwarted the development of a firing vary on communal grazing land often known as Pratobello. That title has since turn out to be synonymous with the protection of 1’s territory, and a rallying cry.

“Sardinia has all the time been a land of conquest,” says Pasquale Mereu, mayor of Orgosolo, who spoke with IEEE Spectrum by way of an interpreter. “We consider that even at the moment we’re nonetheless a colony of Italy, and I’m not ashamed to say it although I symbolize an establishment.”

A longstanding mural on certainly one of his village’s partitions reads: “You might be within the territory of Orgosolo; right here the individuals rule supreme and the federal government obeys.”

Sardinia’s Historical past Shapes its Identification

Driving across the island and speaking to individuals, I can really feel the load of Sardinia’s historical past—and folks’s propensity for holding onto it. Elaborate heritage festivals happen practically each autumn weekend within the island’s inside. They’re properly attended, multigenerational affairs that intention to maintain outdated traditions alive. Within the medieval city of Belvì, males roast chestnuts—marroni—over an open fireplace in a frying pan the scale of a swimming pool after which serve them to the gang by shoveling them into troughs. They’re scrumptious. In an adjoining amphitheater, the gang sways alongside to costumed performers main conventional dances.

Then there are the Bronze Age stone buildings, known as nuraghi, which might be just about in every single place. Constructed earlier than the violent conquests, these conical towers have come to represent a romanticized imaginative and prescient of the heyday of Sardinia’s independence. Greater than 7,000 of them stay, starting from unremarkable piles of rocks to advanced towers, each fastidiously documented on an interactive on-line map. I go to one of many extra intact ones that’s fenced off and requires an admission charge. As I take some video with my cellphone, an worker asks me who I’m and what I’m doing and informs me I’ll have to get permission from the federal government earlier than posting something on-line.

This rock hollowed out by erosion and walled up with stones was doubtless utilized by shepherds as a shelter close to the historic Sardinian village of Tempio Pausania. Luigi Avantaggiato

However in interviews with residents, I’m regularly reminded of the darker facet of Sardinia’s previous. Individuals usually convey up painful issues that occurred 50 or 500 years in the past. A center faculty science trainer named Giannina Serpi, and her husband, Roberto Moro, meet me at a café within the seaside city of Sant’Antioco. After I ask why individuals are so against renewable power, they (like many individuals I interviewed) level to the Nineteen Seventies.

Sheep return from pasture in Bonorva, Sardinia, close to the Bonorva wind farm operated by EDF Renewables. Luigi Avantaggiato

That decade introduced a brand new sort of exploitation: not by empires or governments, however by know-how firms. Petrochemical, aluminum, and different industrial firms from abroad constructed factories on the island, creating jobs and adjoining companies. However after a number of many years, financial and geopolitical elements led the businesses to shut the factories, sinking native economies and in some circumstances abandoning poisonous contamination.

Within the northern metropolis of Porto Torres, a number of petrochemical vegetation, a thermoelectric power plant, and an industrial harbor employed about 8,000 employees within the early Nineteen Seventies. However the oil crises of that decade took its toll on jobs, and when environmental contamination grew to become evident within the Nineteen Nineties, employment plunged additional. By 2010, a lot of the petrochemical vegetation had closed. Research present that residents of Porto Torres throughout that point had curiously excessive charges of loss of life from most cancers, though there is no such thing as a consensus on the trigger.

Equally, research have discovered higher rates of lead in kids within the Portovesme space within the southwest, a couple of 20-minute drive from the place I sit with Serpi and Moro in Sant’Antioco. There, the U.S. aluminum producer Alcoa operated a smelter that employed about 500 individuals and supported an estimated 1,500 adjoining jobs. However the firm shut down the smelter in 2012. Three years earlier, Russian aluminum producer Rusal had idled its Eurallumina manufacturing unit close by.

The impacts of those occasions nonetheless really feel recent, Serpi explains by way of a digital translator. She says she teaches this historical past to her college students however doesn’t inform them easy methods to really feel about it. “I allow them to determine,” she says.

Vitality Colonialism in Sardinia

Towards this backdrop, renewable-energy builders within the early 2010s started sizing up Sardinia. They had been drawn by a budget land, low inhabitants, robust wind, and solar that shines a mean of about 300 days a yr. EF Solare Italia commissioned an 11-MW photo voltaic plant in 2010. Rome-based Enel Inexperienced Energy started building of a 90-MW wind farm in Portoscuso the next yr.

Different builders adopted, they usually principally got here from elsewhere—mainland Italy, Europe, and later, China. The way in which many Sardinians noticed it, the brand new vegetation didn’t convey many long-lasting jobs. Many of the work ended after the design and set up phases, and earnings went again to the businesses’ headquarters outdoors of Sardinia, they argued. Individuals known as it “power colonialism” and lauded landowners who refused to promote or lease their property to builders.

Pink granite known as Ghiandone Limbara was extracted from the Sinnada quarry in northern Sardinia from the late Nineteen Seventies to 2011. Luigi Avantaggiato

The uncle of Oxford’s Sotgiu is a kind of landowners. She says that a few years in the past a photo voltaic firm requested him if he would permit the set up of an array on his household farm in Logudoro in Sardinia’s inside. “From that, he would have gotten one thing round €150,000 a yr, which is more cash than he’s seen in his life,” says Sotgiu. The cash may have coated his three youngsters’ school training, she says. “However he refused.”

He had many causes. For one, switching from sheep grazing to the extra passive enterprise of leasing land would have put the destiny of his revenue within the arms of an outsider. “When you deprive a area of any form of economic system that’s self-reliant, then it’s actually fragile,” says Sotgiu. Her uncle didn’t belief that the revenue would final, and nervous he’d be left with a ruined farm, she says. Plus, his farm has been within the household for generations and certainly one of his sons is concerned with persevering with the enterprise. “So I perceive his pleasure in saying, ‘No, that is my farm, I don’t care in regards to the cash,’” she says.

Sardinia has one of many largest carbon footprints per capita in Europe.

Regardless of that sort of grassroots resistance, improvement continued. In 2023, the Italian authorities licensed the development of a 1-GW submarine energy cable to attach Sardinia to Sicily and the Italian mainland. When accomplished, the bidirectional cable, known as the Tyrrhenian Link, will enhance electrical energy alternate between the areas, bolster grid reliability, and assist grid operators effectively use extra renewable power.

Sardinian activists, nonetheless, view the cable as a option to justify much more building of wind and photo voltaic vegetation, and to export the island’s power for the good thing about non-Sardinians. The island already exports about 40 p.c of its electricity, largely to Corsica and the Italian mainland by way of two present submarine cables.

The Florinas wind farm, commissioned in 2004, was one of many earliest wind farms in-built Sardinia. Luigi Avantaggiato

After which got here the tipping level. In June 2024, in an effort to fulfill the European Union’s 2030 renewable power targets, Italy dedicated to constructing greater than 80 GW of latest wind and photo voltaic power capability over December 2020 ranges. The nationwide authorities divvied up the burden amongst its areas and informed Sardinia to construct its portion, 6.2 GW.

The transfer triggered an onslaught of requests from wind and photo voltaic builders wanting to construct tasks in Sardinia. The queue at one level topped 50 GW of grid-connection requests. That represented greater than 700 photo voltaic and wind tasks, a lot of which got here from firms outdoors of Sardinia.

The southern newspaper L’Unione Sarda ran wild with the numbers. Nearly day by day, for months, it printed tales in regards to the “wind assault.” The decision-to-arms posts urged individuals to protest. “The Assault on the Panorama Does Not Cease; The Risk From Agrivoltaics Is Rising,” learn a July 2024 headline. Unsubstantiated articles tried to hyperlink wind and photo voltaic builders to organized crime.

“It was scaremongering,” says Sotgiu. “It was slightly dishonest, as I noticed it, as a result of they stored exaggerating and scaring individuals into pondering that we had been going to be invaded.” (Representatives of the newspaper declined to remark.)

The numbers did scare individuals. Misplaced was the truth that a grid-connection request is simply the beginning of a multiyear course of that includes allowing and authorized evaluation and sometimes ends in withdrawn or downsized tasks. Submitting a request is cheap, and builders usually solid a large web by getting into plenty of these queues globally to extend the percentages of being accepted. In the long run, solely a fraction come to fruition. In different phrases, constructing all, and even most, of the requested 50 GW was by no means going to occur.

“I attempted to clarify this” to the general public, says an industrial engineer on the College of Cagliari, in Sardinia, who requested to stay nameless to keep away from any detrimental impacts of talking out. “I went to the regional tv station. But it surely’s tough with technical data. And the newspaper communication is so unhealthy, and its influence is so robust in the neighborhood, that it’s very tough to alter individuals’s minds,” he says.

Pratobello 2024 and Anti-Wind Protests

And so the collective angst attributable to highly effective outsiders, trade, and the state united Sardinians right into a singular trigger. Confronted with what felt like one other tried conquest, they did what their households and group had taught them to do: They resisted. Says Mereu: “That is what we’re rebelling towards: the concept Sardinians are few and subsequently should put up with all the pieces.”

In a nod to the 1969 resistance in Orgosolo, they dubbed the motion “Pratobello 2024.” Activist teams, known as “committees,” organized protests, and created social media campaigns and movies. 1000’s of individuals began exhibiting up at deliberate demonstrations. A lawyer went on a starvation strike. Vandals unscrewed bolts on wind turbine blades and set fireplace to grid and building tools.

Italy’s transmission system operator, Terna, needed to change to firm automobiles with out logos to keep away from being focused. College students learning the electrical energy system in a master’s program sponsored by Terna had been verbally attacked at an airport, in line with a professor at their faculty who spoke with me in regards to the violence.

Celebrities acquired concerned. Italian actress and Bond Woman Caterina Murino met with Sardinia’s president to ask her to reject wind farms. Murino posted on Instagram: “No one contact Sardinia!!!!” On Italian national TV, the jazz legend Paolo Fresu carried out on trumpet whereas in style TV host Geppi Cucciari learn an impassioned lament in regards to the exploitation of the island.

Sardinian writer Erre Push penned a graphic novel titled Fàula Birdi a couple of protagonist who resisted an imposition from outsiders. He wrote it upon the request of the activist group ReCommon, whose mission is to “problem company and state energy chargeable for the plunder of territories.” Push hopes the e book will encourage extra individuals to comply with the protagonist’s lead. “Renewables are one other imposition like previously—to not assist Sardinians however to assist exterior individuals like trade managers or founders of firms,” he informed me by way of an interpreter.

Involved in regards to the inflow of photo voltaic and wind farms being in-built Sardinia by outsiders, Roberto Pusceddu, beneath his pen title Erre Push, printed a graphic novel that aimed to encourage younger individuals to withstand such impositions. Luigi Avantaggiato

Mereu and a community of mayors drafted the petition that gathered so many signatures. The individuals had spoken. In response, Sardinian politicians handed a legislation that imposed an 18-month ban on building of wind and photo voltaic tasks inside 7 km of a nuraghe or different archeological website. It wasn’t a complete ban, nevertheless it may as properly have been. “When you put a circle with a 7-km radius round every archeological website, you cowl all of Sardinia,” says Emilio Ghiani, an influence methods skilled on the College of Cagliari. “On this approach, it’s unattainable to discover a place to put in a brand new plant.”

The transfer was like giving the Italian authorities—and the EU’s clear power targets—the center finger. And it despatched renewable-energy builders scrambling. One firm constructing an agriphotovoltaic plant raced to convey building to 30 p.c completion, which the brand new legislation stated was the edge for being allowed to proceed. The corporate requested to not be named on this story to keep away from hassle.

Livid, the federal government in Rome challenged the Sardinian regional legislation in Italy’s Constitutional Courtroom, and in January this yr it prevailed. In its resolution, the courtroom rejected the legislation, saying that renewable-energy tasks must be evaluated case by case.

Venture improvement shortly resumed. So did the backlash. A headline in L’Unione Sarda declared: “Sufficient With High-Down Choices With out Consulting Communities.”

Sardinia’s Renewable Vitality Battle

The place the island goes from right here is unclear. There’s a willingness amongst a portion of the inhabitants to maneuver ahead with an power transition. For instance, some of Sardinia’s largest cheese makers are powering their operations with renewable power and putting in methods to make the most of waste warmth for effectivity. However for probably the most half, the public isn’t budging in its resistance. Researchers try to dispel inaccurate data, however regional newspapers appear bent on perpetuating worry.

Plus, there are technical points to work out earlier than a full-scale power transition will be made. Sardinia’s transmission system was constructed across the centralized era of two coal vegetation; it wasn’t made for the distributed era of wind and photo voltaic vegetation. Renewables require a extra dynamic grid, extra power storage, and a wider vary of energy sources to compensate for his or her intermittency. Engineers are engaged on it, however they’ve acquired a methods to go.

The brand new Tyrrhenian Hyperlink undersea energy cable will assist with that. By connecting Sardinia, Sicily, and the mainland, the cable creates extra flexibility within the system. When wind or photo voltaic era slows in Sardinia, for instance, electrical energy from the mainland can fill within the hole, and vice versa. “It’ll enhance the reliability of the system, and after it’s put in, it will likely be potential to change off the outdated era vegetation that use coal,” says Ghiani. In January, Terna completed laying the western part of the cable between Sardinia and Sicily, and in April it accomplished the jap part between Sicily and Campania on the mainland. Doing so set a world record for power cable depth, at 2,150 meters beneath sea stage, in line with Terna.

Italy initially ordered Sardinia’s two coal vegetation to close down by 2025 however later prolonged the deadline to 2038.

The hyperlink is likely one of the most revolutionary high-voltage direct current (HVDC) projects in Europe. It will probably transfer as much as a gigawatt of energy and reverse that energy movement practically instantaneously. Through the use of voltage supply converter (VSC) know-how, it may additionally assist stop power-flow issues by regulating frequency and smoothing out oscillations within the grid in actual time. And it has black-start functionality: Within the occasion of a shutdown, it may assist restore the grid with out counting on an exterior electrical community. These options are notably useful for an remoted community like Sardinia’s.

Italy has created new incentives and rules to construct a marketplace for grid-scale power storage. Having loads of storage is a key to scaling up renewables as a result of it supplies backup energy when the wind isn’t blowing or the solar isn’t shining. To this finish, Italy created MACSE, an public sale that provides storage builders income certainty. Its title interprets to mechanism for the procurement of electrical energy storage capability. The primary public sale spherical, in September, efficiently awarded 10 GWh.

Vitality specialists in Sardinia are additionally working with policymakers to alter the principles round grid-connection requests. However these sorts of nerdy particulars don’t grace most family conversations.

Industrial Websites Host Vitality Storage

One thing extra accessible that the general public can get behind is constructing renewables on Sardinia’s deserted industrial websites. “To be sincere, not all the pieces is so lovely right here. We have now loads of industrial areas the place you’ll be able to place PV panels. We have now loads of rooftops,” electrical engineer Pilo says. “We have now unused coal mines.” I go to one such mission that’s continuing with native help—or no less than with out a lot opposition. It’s a coal mine close to Gonnesa that shut down in 2018 and is now being become a knowledge heart and a pumped-hydro power storage system.

The plan is to maneuver water by way of the mine’s vertical geometry by way of an enclosed membrane—like a gentle pipe—and use the movement to show a turbine that generates electrical energy. The water then will get pumped again to the floor and saved in pear-shaped vessels above floor. The scheme will assist energy the information heart, which will probably be constructed each above and beneath floor, together with within the mine’s largest chambers practically 500 meters beneath the Earth’s floor.

Vitality Vault will take away outdated mining tools from the Carbosulcis coal mine close to Gonnesa to make approach for an underground information heart [above]. It is going to be powered by a pumped-hydro power storage system that flows by way of the mine’s vertical geometry and shops water in above-ground tanks [top].Luigi Avantaggiato

Vitality storage developer Energy Vault is constructing it, and regardless of being primarily based in Lugano, Switzerland—that’s, not Sardinia—the corporate appears to have prevented protest. It helps that the mine is owned by Carbosulcis, a Sardinian regional-government-owned firm, which is asking the photographs on the mission.

Plus, doing nothing with the mine prices cash. The mine closed eight years in the past as a result of it wasn’t worthwhile, however Carbosulcis should proceed sustaining it due to its excessive methane emissions, which require monitoring and air flow to stop explosions and leaks. Carbosulcis managers figured that in the event that they’re going to proceed placing cash and personnel into the mine, they may as properly do one thing helpful with it, Luca Manzella, vice chairman for Europe, Center East, and Africa at Vitality Vault, says as he and I tour the mine.

An revolutionary mission in Sardinia’s inside—Vitality Dome’s grid-scale carbon dioxide battery—appears to be avoiding protest as properly. Inbuilt a gated industrial advanced close to Ottana, this energy-storage facility seems to be like an enormous bubble—the type that matches over a stadium or tennis advanced. It’s full of carbon dioxide that’s compressed to retailer 200 MWh of electrical energy for the grid. Though the bubble is seen from a number of of the encompassing hillside villages, and though the developer is headquartered on the mainland, there’s little signal of public pushback.

Vitality Dome started working its 20-megawatt, long-duration energy-storage facility in July 2025 in Ottana, Sardinia. In partnership with Google, the corporate this yr goals to construct replicas of the system on a number of continents.Luigi Avantaggiato

One other path ahead is thru “power communities.” On this grassroots method, customers work collectively to construct their very own photo voltaic plant or different energy era. Dozens of those communities are already energetic on the island, in line with the Sardinian Electricity Association, a gaggle that gives steering to customers.

However by far the best want is for power builders and authorities to grasp the individuals and the historical past of the land on which they wish to construct. “When Europe or the nationwide authorities make a legislation, they should additionally take into account the background of Sardinian individuals and why they’re so afraid,” says Simone Micheletti, CEO at Futura Group, a renewable-energy developer primarily based in Serramanna, Sardinia. “You can’t apply the identical legislation to Sweden and Sicily. Typically you could perceive [the situation] domestically,” he says.

Determination makers in every single place could be clever to hear. In any other case, they could undergo the identical destiny as their counterparts in Sardinia: despised by locals, delayed by politics, and stunned at how badly all of it went.

Particular because of Luigi Avantaggiato for decoding and extra reporting.