Taranto, Italy: The Mediterranean’s first offshore wind farm is rising from the shallows off Italy, its turbines a symbol of hope for a Europe suffering an energy crisis exacerbated by war.
The park will stretch out from the port in Taranto, a city in the south blighted by a noxious steel plant and unemployment, but which now finds itself centre stage in the country’s race to scale up green power.
“This is a big chance to change hearts and minds on renewables,” said Fabio Matacchiera, an activist in Taranto, where child tumours are well above the average but poor locals cling to jobs in dirty energy.
The Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine in February prompted an outraged European Union to pledge to sharply reduce its dependency on Russian gas, and expand clean energy faster to compensate.
Italy is one of Europe’s biggest guzzlers of gas, which currently represents 42 percent of its energy consumption. It imports 95 percent of the gas it uses, 45 percent of which comes from Russia.
An “accelerated investment in renewables… remains the only key strategy in the long term,” Prime Minister Mario Draghi told parliament last week, with Rome planning to stop using Russian gas by 2025.
As the Ukraine conflict rages, Italy’s cabinet has approved six new wind farms to be built on land, from Sardinia to Basilicata, and has committed to unlocking “several tens of gigawatts of offshore wind power”.
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