Sardinia’s wind farm nightmare – and what it means for Britain
Salvatore Maxia has spent more or less his whole life farming sheep and cattle in the hills around his native San Basilio. Now he is 90 and slowing down. “These days”, he explains with a gravelly laugh, “you’ll generally find me in three places: at home, here in the bar, or in my car driving between the two.” Dressed in earthen brown cords and matching waistcoat, as he sips his mid-morning Ichnusa, Sardinia’s national beer, Maxia seems to embody the island’s unofficial motto – live slow, live long. He reminisces cryptically but with a dangerous twinkle in his eye about his younger exploits in New York and London during the ferragosto, Italy’s traditional August holiday. He has the air of a man who isn’t bothered by much.
That is, until someone mentions wind farms. “Ah, turbine…” His face clouds over and he makes a grumpy hand gesture as if swiping a wasp away. “I remember when they weren’t here. I remember the promises.” A murmur of agreement strikes up among his drinking partners in the Bar Centrale – Antonello Spiga, a retired carabinieri, and others. These men are reticent, however. It is a caution born not, these days, of active fear, but of deep custom, a legacy of Sardinia’s long chronicle of exploitation at the hands of outsiders – “the continent”, as people here refer to mainland Italy. Eventually, Maxia claims, “The wind company, they promised me and others money. They never paid me a penny.”
Father Alessandro Melis breezes in for his morning coffee. The priest is a good generation younger than Maxia but treats him and his friends with paternal, chastising humour. When he hears the talk of wind farms he rolls his eyes. “Comitato”, he chuckles, provoking an exaggerated protest from Spiga, a spring chicken at 58. The word translates literally as “committee”. But it has other meanings: activists, agitators. There are currently comitati, only far more angry than this, springing up across Sardinia.
Outside, the bar’s red awning flaps in the stiff wind. The mistral – it arrived last night, barrelling from the cold Alps, down the Rh?ne corridor and out into the warm Mediterranean. Now it is here it will last three or four days. It is probably stronger than ideal for the 29 turbines mounted on the hill above the town that cause Maxia, Spiga and their friends such anguish. Their gears prefer a consistent, gentler push rather than a battering. But this morning they are coping, the 52-metre-diameter blades of all but one are flying with full abandon against the blue sky and scudding fragments of cloud. In doing so, they are providing vital clean energy for nearly 15,000 households, their manufacturers say; atoning for the sins of our carbon-fuelled industrial revolution; stabilising our planet’s temperature before it is too late.
By and large, the locals hate them. Commissioned in 2010, the wind farm disfigured the precious landscape while offering virtually nothing in the way of jobs or compensation, they say. We put this, and Maxia’s claim, to the company registered as the owner of the turbines. They did not respond.
A four-by-four laden with hay bales passes close under one of the turbines, near a sign bidding drivers farewell from San Basilio. It is riddled with bullet holes. The arrhythmic clang of goat bells can be heard in the low shrubbery, but other than that these hills are all but bare. In the 19th century King Victor Emmanuel II pillaged Sardinia’s forests to provide wood for sleepers on the mainland’s railways, leaving much of the island unrecognisable. Now, with wind farms, Sardinians fear such exploitation is happening again.
In July, Alessandra Todde, Sardinia’s newly elected Left-wing president, imposed an emergency 18-month moratorium on construction of wind farms so the region could “decide its destiny”. The plan for approximately 3,000 turbines on top of the existing 780 was simply too many, her administration said, and risked irrevocably damaging the island’s unique way of life, not to mention its agricultural and tourism sectors, the latter of which attracts nearly six million visitors a year.
In doing so she has set herself up for an almighty battle with the government in Rome, which holds ultimate power over planning in rural areas and grants generous subsidies to renewables companies. It is a fight many legal observers believe she will lose. In the meantime, her administration is hurriedly drafting new rules in an attempt to provide Sardinia with some degree of planning protection. As a spokesman phrased it, to put an end to the regulatory “wild west”.
There is a certain irony in the spectacle of a prominent progressive politician, who has long advocated for a move away from fossil fuels, now defying the renewables agenda of Giorgia Meloni’s Right-wing government. Beneath the surface politics, however, there are fundamental questions at play: localism, democracy, capitalism itself. Their answers may determine how this new green industrial revolution unfolds, perhaps whether it will succeed or fail altogether. Why, say Todde’s supporters, should Sardinia suffer the mechanisation of its beautiful landscape to become the “power station” for the rest of Italy for no tangible benefit? What is the point of rescuing the environment in one way only to destroy it in another?
Europe is watching. In Britain, the new Labour Government has promised to double the output of onshore wind farms by 2030, ending a nine-year hiatus on their construction. Announcing a “clean energy sprint” in September, Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, dismissed pleas for a height restriction and vowed to defeat “the blockers, the delayers, the obstructionists” – the NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard), in other words – in pursuit of his goal. If Sardinia is anything to go by, there are bitter times ahead.
Claudio Ollanu has the crippling handshake of a man who works all day with rocks. He used to be a financier in Milan, Rome, Florence and abroad. But as he progressed through his 30s he felt a yearning to return to his rural roots in Sardinia’s southern inland territory of Sarcidano. He wanted to create something new and alive out of the area’s ancient heritage.
The result is Is Perdas, a luxury retreat and spa overlooking the Rio Mannu valley. It is a love song to the island’s Bronze Age Nuragic civilisation, built from the rocks they used to construct their circular dwellings and fortresses, whose remains still scatter the landscape. Everything about the place, from its amphitheatre to the stone swimming pool and private grotto replete with a natural “waterfall” bath, is hugged and shaped by the geology. At more than ￡200 a night in high season, it is a thriving example of Sardinia’s “slow” agritourism sector; a conscious snub to the soulless, high-rise experience across so much of the Mediterranean.
“The Nuragic were the original inhabitants of this island,” says Ollanu, now 40. “Through these stones we are writing a new story, a new language. We cannot quantify how valuable this landscape is to us.” As he speaks he strokes the neck of one of the pair of oxen he keeps in a dry-stone-walled pen. He uses them to drag the giant rocks around his 50-hectare estate, in the old way. He bounds over to the four giant menhir standing stones he has installed to align with the sun on the summer solstice. Behind them to the west is the Giara di Gesturi, the high, wild plateau known for its roaming horses. With his giddy mix of childlike enthusiasm and burning seriousness, and the timeless rocks, the oxen, the sun setting over the far Giara, Ollanu seems to conjure up the mythology that means so much to him.
But he has a big problem. Pointing down to the farmland below Is Perdas, he explains that the government has authorised the building of more than 100 turbines in this and the next valley. Many of them are set to be the new-in-class monsters of the industry: 220 metres high, slightly less than the height of London’s Canary Wharf tower. They will be visible, he says, from entire regions away.
For Ollanu, the irony is too much to bear. Three and a half thousand years ago Sardinia was an interconnected network of more than 8,000 Nuragic towers. “Now…” He trails off. “We can’t create this narrative of Sardinia as a beautiful place to attract people from all over the world if we are having to justify wind turbines. You only have to spend a few days in this place to realise it is worth trying to find another solution. Everywhere has its peculiarities, but Sardinia is a bit more special, and we shouldn’t be ashamed to say it.”
Andrea Cocco
There are already a handful of the standard-sized wind turbines towards the top of the valley’s southern ridge. But – from Is Perdas, at least – they do not seem too intrusive. Scores of the larger machines, however, will change this landscape beyond recognition. Each will require up to 1,000 tonnes of concrete to root it into the soil.
In post-Nuragic times, the area was known as the granary of Rome, such was its prodigious agricultural output. Now, islanders see a congruent theme at play in the capital’s ambitions for Sardinia as a source of clean energy. The Italian government is demanding an extra 6.2 gigawatts (GW) from the territory, yet the island reportedly only needs to produce a fraction of that to satisfy its own demands. Husbanding this new wellspring of environmentally friendly energy demands infrastructure – new power hubs, upgraded underground cables.
Meanwhile, a new undersea cabling system called the Tyrrhenian Link is planned to transfer the electricity across to Sicily and then the continent. Two of its onshore hubs are destined for the environmentally sensitive coastal area of Terra Mala. There were sit-ins earlier this year by protesters trying to protect the olive trees. Farmers whose land has been forcefully expropriated have been in court.
“We find ourselves in the position of being called upon to defend something that fortunately is ours,” says Ollanu. “We have to protect it for our children. If we don’t, there’s going to be trouble.”
As if on cue, later that night there is an arson attack on a warehouse storing solar panels intended for a massive photovoltaic plant near the archaeological site of Barumini, Sardinia’s equivalent of Stonehenge. Hundreds are destroyed. These solar plants are causing almost as much grief on the island as wind farms, with accusations that they ruin for ever topsoil cultivated over millennia. Although far more vulnerable to sabotage than turbines, they seem to provoke the same flavour of disgust in the rural population. Part of this is undoubtedly a feeling of alienation.
The destruction of nature to make way for industry has always been traumatic. But in the past – think the coal mines and factories of the industrial revolution – it came with jobs. Wind turbines, by contrast, require skilled construction engineers, and then more or less run themselves. Often they are monitored from a control room miles away. It means, in the view of the regulars at San Basilio’s Bar Centrale, of Ollanu and countless others, that ancient landscapes are mutilated and tourism damaged for no local return. The landowner may, if they are wily, earn €10,000 a year per turbine in rent. But the company, often with the cushion of a government-guaranteed minimum price, will likely earn more than a hundred times that figure. Meanwhile, the rest of the community has to live alongside them for nothing, save perhaps for the promise of some community infrastructure payments. In the words of one local hotel-owner, “a playground 10 kilometres away”.
One man in no doubt about the arbitrary and brutal nature of the process is Gianni Pilloni. Four decades ago he purchased a small plot of land in the higgledy-piggledy hills near Sanluri in order to pursue his dream of producing his own wine. Now 72, he successfully grows cannonau, sangiovese, bovale and monica grapes for his small output of vini rossi; vermentino for the bianco. He’s gruff but warm. Even after all these years he still seems mesmerised by the process of growing. He strokes his vines like they are pets.
When we went to visit him he was all but a broken man. A wind company is planning to build several massive turbines in the hills surrounding his plot and told him they would need his land as an assembly area. They had secured a temporary “expropriation”, a form of time-limited compulsory purchase order, for the 18 months it would take to build. His vines would be ripped up and the ground flattened, he said. For this Pilloni could expect total compensation of just €99.49.
“I will try to regrow, but…” He walks up the avenue shaking his head. “It’s the whole landscape. There is no respect for the people living and working here.”
We contacted the wind company, Milan-headquartered Engie Italia. They said Mr Pilloni’s name “does not appear among the owners of small plots of land that are affected by our project”. Really? It seemed unlikely he was mistaken. Indeed, numerous activists had rallied to his cause and were turning out to support him when we visited. We asked Engie to check again. Did they have any knowledge at all of a vineyard in the area being expropriated? No reply.
Some days later, Pilloni got back to us. He had scoured the latest planning documents. It appeared Engie was now in some kind of negotiation with a neighbouring power company, the result being that the transport and assembly routes had been changed. It meant his vineyard, his life’s dream, was reprieved. The decision might have been taken weeks ago. No one had bothered to tell him.
The new-generation turbines are acquiring an almost mythical status in Sardinia. Perhaps that is because, so far, relatively few have been built. One such site is near the town of Villacidro, about halfway between the island’s principal port cities of Cagliari and Oristano. Even from three or four miles away the turbine seems to dwarf the town. But driving towards it, minute after minute, it doesn’t appear to be getting any bigger – the hallmark of a truly massive structure. Standing in an adjacent field, it is a shock to realise the ant-like objects crawling around the base are in fact multi-tonne earthmoving lorries, the kind that would singlehandedly snarl up a high street. Under construction since December, the turbine dominates its surroundings; even Monte Linas, behind it, appears irrelevant.
Andrea Cocco
There were nasty scenes around the perimeter of Oristano’s port this summer as activists tried to block the path of the gargantuan vehicles that transport the towers. Police and protesters clashed; arrests were made; three men were intercepted in a car from Cagliari allegedly carrying pickaxes, clubs and chains. Once out, other component parts soon replaced them on the wharf. All over Sardinia there is gossip about lorries getting stuck, of old roads having to be widened to accommodate them.
It is sometimes hard to separate fact from exaggeration, such as whether you can see these new turbines at Villacidro from both the port cities, more than 60 miles apart by road. Standing under them, it seems eminently possible. Ignoring their size, they are perhaps a little more graceful, these new designs. There is greater contour and curve to the blades, as if in homage to the invisible power that soon will drive them. And it must be acknowledged that some people find them beautiful, either as objects in themselves or as symbols of environmental hope.
That does not impress Antonio Muscas, however, who owns some of the adjacent land in Villacidro. An agricultural machines specialist, the 54 year old knows the UK a bit, having worked in Leamington Spa. He says he has been legally forced to limit some activity in his fields, such as grazing livestock, because of proximity to the machines. “These big ones, they’re coming to England,” he says. “People there need to be extremely careful. The companies have so much power and they can influence governments.”
Muscas does not allege any wrongdoing per se. Instead he describes what he sees as an imbalance of power and a frustrating lack of transparency. This project in particular has inflamed atavistic hostility towards the Piedmontese, the rich northern Italians who historically bear such a heavy blame for Sardinia’s woes. The company building this vast multimillion-euro turbine, DAS Villacidro, has a share capitalisation of just €10,000, according to public documents, and appears to be registered to a nondescript residential building in the Piedmontese town of Ceva. According to the Italian investigative website IFA News, the firm’s ultimate ownership resides in the hands of Piedmontese magnate and football club owner Fabio Boveri, the commercial director and son of the founder of SIMIC Spa, a company that makes heavy machinery for the nuclear, oil and gas industries.
We asked Boveri by email if this was true. He never replied. For Muscas, this all contributes to a sense of powerlessness on the ground. Who really owns these terrain-altering behemoths? Who profits?
Gianluca Serra, the mayor of Genoni, a small town not far from Baramuni, is more forthright. “These are multinational companies motivated only by profit,” he says. “They are trying to ‘save the world”’ – his finger quotes here are excoriating – “using the same system that got us into this mess. Their concept of green energy is a trap.”
With his Mot?rhead T-shirt and grey hair in a ponytail, Serra doesn’t look like a traditional NIMBY. The mayor, 57, wants to meet at the museum set high on a hill behind the town with grandiose views of central Sardinia. In contrast to Is Perdas, here the obsession is more paleo than prehistoric, with racks and racks of sea fossils harking back to a time when even this inland region was under water. He takes out a tourist map of the area and a biro and begins to mark the locations of the intended wind turbines; also the new power hubs to manage the electricity they will create.
The threat is particularly galling for a part of the island already suffering from depopulation, he says. The reverence for archaeology, for history, is relatively newfound, a determined effort to battle the economic drift by creating an industry out of the past, building on Unesco recognition, EU grants and so on. He says an influx of new infrastructure will ruin all that.
‘We are not trying to save the world, we are trying to save ourselves,’ he exclaims, looking out at the view, exasperated. ‘We’ve created a paradise here and we don’t even know who these speculators are.’
Despite his pugnacity, Serra, a soil sciences graduate, believes firmly in climate change. He believes in the need for renewables. For him, though, the solutions have to be local. He talks of local energy committees, community networks of producers and receivers – people with solar panels on their private property, for example. He mentions a new EU law mandating that production and consumption of power should be as geographically close as possible. He fumes that Italy was one of the few states to vote against it.
Pietro Procedda and his partner Elizabeth Gessler, leading lights in the efforts to oppose the building of seven huge turbines above the west coast town of Narbolia, don’t look like traditional nimbies either. Wearing a flowery shirt and baggy trousers, Procedda scoots his epicly faded Fiat Panda around the backstreets as if on autopilot. He has, after all, known them all his life. The couple, both 72, are firmly of the Left, they confirm over delicious coffee sourced from the Chiapas region of Mexico via a local ethical collective. But they are not party-aligned. Rather, it seems they are from the old communitarian Left; mildly hippyish; exactly the sort of people who supported the environmental movement in the first place.
‘The Left-wing politicians were never interested in the countryside,’ says Gessler. ‘They were only interested in the industrial areas. But this [wind farms] is bringing people together.’ They too want to see local energy committees, the use of brownfield sites, solar panels by the side of the road.
That might work – just – for low-population Sardinia. But what about renewables for Milan, Turin, Rome? Remember, it takes all of those 29 turbines above San Basilio to power 15,000 homes.
Gessler answers that hydroelectric technology could be better harnessed, especially to power heavy industry. Either way, she says, it has to be publicly owned.
That is something you hear a lot across Sardinia. It is what Gianluca Serra meant when he referred to the ‘same system that got us into this mess’. Capitalism, in other words. To whatever extent that is true, there is a body of opinion among modern environmentalists, those who would gleefully coat every valley and mountain in turbines, that the only way to gain consent for the green revolution is to enable country-dwelling people to profit directly from it, to give them legal ownership of the wind.
Right now, however, it’s as much as rural Sardinian folk can do to keep up with events. ‘Often even the mayors of the villages don’t know what’s happening,’ says Procedda. ‘The committees try to stay vigilant and keep local people informed.’ He sighs, as if briefly accepting the futility of it all. ‘The trouble is there are lots of different committees. They all have different visions.’
Alessandra Todde hands round casadina cake in her presidential office in Cagliari. To outsiders, she appears the perfect rallying point for her island’s disjointed rural anger. Sardinian to her core, she is a child of Nuoro, one of the so-called Blue Zones, areas of exceptional life-expectancy, thanks to the traditional lifestyle and contact with nature.
“What we are trying to preserve is this quality of life, given the special path that our communities are following,” she says. “If you are transforming these areas to industrial activity for renewables, this is something that could be lost.”
Despite her dashing moratorium, the reality is more complicated. In short, she is a serious politician living in the real world. A former finance minister in Mario Draghi’s national government, she knows her power is ultimately to mediate and channel Rome’s demands, not to block them. She talks earnestly about her new regional law to designate more and less suitable areas for wind farm development; of establishing a Sardinian publicly owned company to directly reduce the price of energy bills. “Sardinia is not going to be transformed into a battery for Italy or Europe,” she says. “We are going to cope with the transition in our way, as Sardinians.”
Like their counterparts in Rome, Sir Keir Starmer and Ed Miliband have their targets. They have also vowed not to allow local opposition to derail their dream of a green industrial future and are altering the law accordingly. President Todde knows the British countryside well. A one-time London resident, she adored her walking holidays in Yorkshire and along Hadrian’s Wall. So, what advice would she give to her fellow centre-Left politicians?
“The most important thing is to set a crystal-clear path, in the sense that there should be proper involvement of the communities. I believe that if communities see that there are benefits for them in terms of power bills becoming lower, in terms of infrastructure or services, the impact can be negotiated.”
Sitting in the well-appointed office with Matisse and other art books visible on the shelves, chewing the delicious casadina, it sounds reasonable. The planet is suffering. But it is hard to imagine Salvatore Maxia, Claudio Ollanu, Gianni Pilloni, Gianluca Serra and Antonio Muscas being totally convinced. Ollanu was both right and wrong – Sardinia is indeed “a bit more special”. But so is rural Kent to those who live there, Wiltshire, Andalusia, Normandy, Bavaria. It is in the nature of country living to feel that your piece of it is irreplaceable. Perhaps, like Father Melis, we ought to just roll our eyes and get on with it.
But then more of Ollanu’s words echo back. “Trouble,” he had said, that windswept evening looking out at the Giara. “There’s going to be trouble.”