“It is a refined system of connections to business and politicians. A handful of people control the wind sector. Many companies exist but it is the same people behind them.” That’s the declaration by Roberto Scarpinato to the Financial Times. The newspaper gives on its front page: “Mafia gangs probed over Italy windfarms” Inside it has devoted a WHOLE PAGE to the topic. After the past they are now screwing up the future as well.
Renewable energy is the exchange field of action between companies, politics and organised crime. Italy has a long history of incinerators, toxic refuse tips, purifiers that have never been started. Illness, polluted food, and water courses turned into sewers.
Now we start afresh. Like before, but more so. Wherever public funding is arriving, there the colluding politicians arrive, the exchange vote, the destruction of territory. We have invented the wind turbines in the countryside, that are working while immobile. The blades do not go round, but we get angry.
” Italian and European Union subsidies for building wind farms and the world's highest guaranteed rates for the electricity they produce have turned southern Italy into a highly attractive market exploited by organised crime.”. According to the FT, dozens of wind turbines have been constructed in Sicily, but although there is wind, they stay still, they don’t move. Steel sentinels.
If they don’t produce energy, the turbines produce a profit anyway. According to Rossana Interlandi, the person responsible for the Environment in Sicily, when interviewed by the FT, the companies are attracted by the law that obliges those who distribute energy to pay the owners of wind turbines even if they don’t produce energy. There are 30 wind farms in Sicily, 60 have been approved and 226 are on the waiting list. If they were all to work, Sicily would take to the skies.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that in 2007 1.2% of the energy produced in Italy came from wind. In Denmark it was 20% and in Spain it was 9.8%.
European funding to Italy has to stop. I said that in Brussels last year. It’s like giving money to Bokassa. In Italy, there’s chatter about fiscal federalism. It would be better to call it fiscal share-out of the European contribution of our taxes. Meanwhile, in the world, the production of wind energy has overtaken nuclear energy.