They are in a damned hurry, as if they have to carry off the proscenium of the Oasi del Cervo before anyone notices. From the next few days, however, despite the general mid-August also looming over the countryside, it will not be easy to go unnoticed. Thousands of steel pillars are already driven into the slopes of Gutturu Mannu Park, the link between the metropolitan city of Cagliari and Sulcis. Monte Arcosu, which stands out like a green giant on those lands, is not simply a protected oasis.

Primacy oasis

The annals do not escape this primacy: in that reserve there is the largest extension of scrub-forest and Mediterranean forest in Europe. However, nothing prevented the foreigners of the "panel" from suddenly dismantling an expanse of agricultural land, which had been confined within an area of Macchiareddu only due to industrial greed. The livestock that roamed those lands is locked up in a corner, inside a sheepfold that has been transformed into a "stables" for hens. In these parts, on those fields that line the first flat straight stretch of the Pedemontana, the road artery that runs along Monte Arcosu up to the Castle of Acqua Fredda in Siliqua and Gioiosa Guardia in Villamassargia, they can't rest. You walk by on a Friday night and find them fumbling around. You come back on a Saturday and they're driving steel pillars into the ground. They don't even spare themselves on Sundays, as if an extra solar panel were worth a mass. They have no time to waste, after all they have come from afar, and they have no intention of staying long in Sardinia.

Alps and Dolomites

To make that horizon that stands out on the door of the Monte Arcosu Oasis pale, they had to travel the Abruzzo Alps and even the Dolomites. It seems surreal, but in the presence of Uta and Assemini, the firms responsible for the assault arrive from the other side of the Tyrrhenian Sea. When you approach the start of work sign, faded by a deliberately worn marker and written exhausted by the looming heat, they look at you with the suspicion that they want to steal it. It won't happen, there it was and there it has remained, spelling out names and surnames, businesses and companies, ready to implement that project marked by an epitaph imprinted in the first lines of that sign that is as dirty as it is illegible. Recitation without frills: «construction of a photovoltaic system and connected infrastructures». The property is all an acronym: EEC Solar 2, almost a revenge. The provenance is not unknown: Pescara, via Caravaggio 125. One of the infinite Chinese boxes that make up the "foreign" chessboard who came to Sardinia to "sunshine" and incentives. An avalanche of state gifts handed out hands down to anyone who looks out on the shores of the island-colony to place cyclopean shovels or boundless expanses of photovoltaic panels.

All in family

The Abruzzese on a mission on the slopes of Monte Arcosu have left nothing to chance. The company in charge of placing the sun catalysts is not original, neither in the name, much less in the tax residence: Cantieri Italiani, via Caravaggio 125, still Pescara, in the exact same location as the owner of the solar system. How to say producer and consumer. As construction site support, they chose none other than the Dolomiti Ambiente, a name that spells everything out.

Double shot

The operation, however, is much more than a simple solar field. The project is cyclopean. The construction site that has just begun could touch 100 hectares of photovoltaic panels, a dimension capable of devastating any corner of Sardinia, let alone a proscenium as delicate as the one close to Monte Arcosu. If the signs indicate only one company engaged in this project, the resolutions of the Regional Council that authorized this environmental slap are two, as if to affix an official seal to the fragmentation of the project, perhaps with the aim of avoiding the impact assessment national environment.

First assault

The first assault receives the first authorization on 4 September 2020, the resolution is 44/46. This is proposed by EEC Solar, a limited liability company with just ten thousand euros of paid-up capital. The operation has a fixed address: “51.66 MWp ground-mounted photovoltaic plant in the industrial area of Macchiareddu - Location “Salto di Uta” and “Pranu di Assemini”.

68 hectares of silicon

The Sardinian regional council does not have many scruples and sentences: project approved without subjecting the project to a further environmental impact assessment procedure. It is not a soccer field, but a good 68 hectares. The second low blow to the lands between Uta and Assemini, in the locality of Barraca, was dealt just two months later, as if the memory of the one just approved had vanished in sixty days.

Solar 2, the replica

The regional council gave the green light to the "ECC Solar 2" project on November 18, 2020. An application approved almost in record time, given the times of the Region. The practice, presented on May 27, 2020, not even six months after assault number two, goes through. In this case, another 30 hectares of photovoltaic panels which, added to the other project, become the beauty of 98 hectares of silicon to be spread over that land as if there were no tomorrow. The goal is declared: to put together 70 megawatts of electrical power and an avalanche of incentives. They are in such a hurry to conquer the slopes of the Oasis with panels that they have even forgotten that the company declared as owner of the intervention, the "ECC Solar 2", is even inactive. Not a detail, given that works in progress for 16 million euros are declared on that site. One fact is certain those two projects, formally separate, all belong to the Maresca family, a joint-stock company in Abruzzo with an avalanche of micro-companies with ten thousand euros of capital scattered almost everywhere with others also connected in Sardinia.

The children of the Wolf

“Diomede srl”, the company next door to this first environmental havoc in the areas close to the Oasi del Cervo, has nothing to do with the people of Abruzzo. They come from Rome, and unlike their neighbors they have chosen the most difficult procedure, that of environmental impact assessment. With colonial impetus, however, they are no less than none. For them, nuraghes and archaeological sites are furnishings to be destroyed with panels and scrap metal, despite the opinion of the same archaeologists who signed the plan. In those 220 hectares of silicon that they plan to plant on the lateral slope of Monte Arcosu, the archaeological risk is declared maximum, but the new descent knows no reason. The project is in the pipeline to the Ministry of Energy Security which as a tinsel they still call the Environment. In this case there are already some opinions expressed. Totally contrary to that of the Municipality of Uta.

Opposite, half

In no particular order the opinion of the Region. In some cases there are departments against it, in others wait-and-see prevails. One fact is certain: on the one hand the Region approves of the havoc on the new photovoltaic invasion and on the other it proceeds by groping. That expanse of panels that is about to rise on that promontory will be a real scar on the Oasi del Cervo and on the Isola del sole. Sardinia will have nothing left of that energy, only environmental and landscape devastation.

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