The opposition
In Italy there are 120 committees and associations organizing marches, conferences and petitions to say no to ground-based wind and photovoltaic power. Sometimes they’re right, other times they’re not. Those who are certainly in the wrong are the violent ones: in the last sixteen months there have been seven fires and sabotages. The Agsm construction site authorized for the construction of a wind farm has come under fire several times on the Mugello mountains: Activists removed fences and pickets, hammered nails into trees to make cutting them dangerous, and in July damaged machinery and attacked engineers and lumberjacks. In Sardiniawhere criminal infiltration into the wind power business is suspected, they unscrewed the nuts at the base of the blades, set fire to photovoltaic panels, and threw Molotov cocktails at the protective sheets of a warehouse.
The process for approving the plants does not include consultation with the local population, but the protests influence local politicians according to the logic of Nimtoo («Not in my terms of office», not during my electoral mandate).
An example: June 13th Ponente Green Power offers 4 wind turbines in the Natisone valleysin an area of ​​Friuli that does not fall among those defined as “unsuitable”, and a committee immediately starts collecting signatures. At the end of July, 15 mayors queued because it “compromises the landscape, fauna, population”, and in August the contrary opinions of dozens of associations arrived in the Region. On 2 October the regional energy councilor Fabio Scoccimarro sides with the opposition: «My political assessment is that large wind farms have no reason to exist in our country». The decree of the regional technical commission comes out on the same day: further investigations are needed, the authorization for the four blades will have to pass through the environmental impact assessment.
