For Italy – poor in wind and full of local committees opposed to any “devastation against our landscape” – we add the reason for the difficult consensus. The primary purpose of Italian offshore wind is to avoid the overcrowded ridges of wind turbines and committees of the no.
Everything stems from a fact: primary renewable energy sources, that is water, sun and wind, have a very modest energy density and need to collect the energy dispersed over large portions of space. Whole valleys transformed into hydroelectric lakes, dozens of “windmills” on the ridges of the hills, soils laminated with the opalescent black of silicon. They are very high visibility systems.
The committees for the protection of the landscape are the other, equally noble soul of environmentalism. Instead of wanting to preserve the climate we love, which is why those who support renewable sources are committed, the committees against plants want to preserve the landscape, that identity of the places in which the communities of those who live there are reflected. And comitism has no other means of opposition than the appeals to the bureaucracy, that is to the TARs and to the superintendencies, to invoke the protection of that landscape defended by the Constitution (article 9), unlike the climate.
It is sufficient to recall the first Italian wind power project at sea: fourteen years ago, it was spring 2007, the proposal of some wind turbines in front of the Molise beaches ran into the rigor of Antonio Di Pietro from Molise, who said that his beautiful region “It has a few kilometers of coastline, they can’t ruin it.” The project dissolved in front of the opponent’s media authority.
Projects in progress
The Renexia project of the Toto group is proceeding to build the large Med Wind floating wind farm in the Strait of Sicily, about sixty kilometers offshore: the surveys of the Galatea , ship of the navy, and of the biologists of the Anton Dohrn Zoological Station.