The state blitz has the sign of a six-legged dog on the sea of South Sardinia. The operation started last Wednesday afternoon when Eni officially communicated to the stock exchanges that it intends to invade the Sulcis coast with wind turbines 280 meters high. The body of water in front of the Pan di Zucchero, in the hamlet of Nebida and Masua, in front of Porto Flavia, close to Carloforte and Portoscuso, is under attack by the oil state body. Not just an offshore wind farm, but a real invasion devised in the silence of the wind business which this time has an absolute protagonist: the State.
The giants of state
In fact, the announcement is made by GreenIT, the company that brings together Eni and Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, or rather the investment fund of the "state bank" in relations with Qatar, China, Kuwait, and Kazakhstan . With the two state giants, however, there is also the Danish Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, an investment fund located in the capital of Denmark. The communication is all green, with the illusory statement that these 42 wind turbines in the middle of the sea almost as high as the Eiffel Tower, will even allow to increase the production of green energy and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by up to 1 million tons on annual basis. In the official press release to investors, who were not too excited after the announcement, causing the Eni share to lose 0.81%, the state body even went so far as to state that those wind turbines will serve to "favor the growth of 'local and national industry'.
Nothing for the Sardinians
Too bad that there will be absolutely nothing left of that energy in Sardinia, given that Terna is preparing to create a cable-leash that will be used to transfer that electrical potential both in Sicily and Campania. In the note to the stock exchanges, Eni and Cassa Depositi e Prestiti also forget to admit that with wind energy, unstable, uncertain and non-accumulative, there will not be a single factory that will be able to march, let alone energy-intensive industries such as those of Sulcis. The story of this newly announced state landing, however, starts from afar, when on 24 July 2020, the Sardinian Union exclusively published a project presented by two strangers for the construction of an offshore wind farm to be positioned in the stretch of water in front of the Portovesme industrial area. That they were precursors sent on an advance was understood a mile away. It was difficult to think that companies, in fact anonymous, with ten thousand euros of share capital, could think of carrying out their own projects worth billions of euros in investments.
The tuna route
On that occasion the papers were all classified, with the foolish idea that someone could appropriate the technological copyright proposed to build that wind farm on the tuna route. In reality, the designers also started a procedure that was as anomalous as it was cryptic, all aimed at probing the authorization field: the Sia, an environmental impact study. The 42 sea blades, for an electrical power of 504 megawatts, as much as the "real and effective" power of the Enel's Portovesme power plant, were in fact the first attempt to land aeolian in the Sardinian sea through a ministerial administrative procedure, albeit unknown.
Anglo-Saxon formula
The papers presented to the then Ministry of the Environment used the Anglo-Saxon formula to open the Sardinian coast to the latest wind energy discovery: Floating Offshore Wind Farm, or a real forest of floating wind turbines. An unprecedented plant in the western Mediterranean with 42 wind turbines capable, according to the designers, of each producing at least 12 megawatts. Each shovel of these foreseen in the project, now Eni and Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, protrudes from sea level for 160 meters to which another 125 meters of the radius of the propeller must be added.
42 95-storey buildings
Translated it means 42 buildings of 95 floors each, placed in the middle of the sea 35 km from the coast of the Pan di Zucchero, close to Carloforte, on what has always been the route of tuna, boats, passenger and industrial ships. To praise the project, the parameter of the number of houses that would be satisfied by such a lot of energy is also used: 650 thousand houses. The most important element of this new blitz operation on the Sardinian sea is the total complicity of the State which deploys two of the most powerful public economic entities called to create, through GreenIT, a joint venture between Plenitude, the new Eni company for water. and gas, and the CDP Equity fund for the production of energy from renewable sources, and CI IV, a fund managed by Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners (CIP), for the construction of two floating offshore wind farms in Sicily and Sardinia, for a total capacity of about 750MW Obviously the largest and most invasive is that of Sardinia, double that of Sicily. This element would be enough to understand how much this project is only functional in transforming the island into an energy colony.
Double of Sicily
Sicily, in fact, with a population of 5 million inhabitants will have wind turbines for 250 megawatts from the Eni project, while Sardinia, with one million and six hundred thousand inhabitants, will have over 500. In this statist-style wind invasion there is however, it is an element that opens up an embarrassing scenario for two giants like Eni and Cassa Depositi e Prestiti. In the press release to investors, in fact, they write: "Italian companies with proven experience in the development of Nice Technology and 7 Seas Wind offshore plants for Sardinia contribute to the two projects, also as minority shareholders". An affirmation addressed to the stock exchanges that contrasts not a little with the same corporate history of the two minority companies, already the subject of our investigation in July 2020. How and where this project was born, in fact, can be deduced from the chamber registration, from unknown names and surnames, companies with little money in their assets but with the explicit ambition of earning full hands from an investment of a thousand and one nights. According to the documents in our possession, the floating wind farm in the south-western Sardinian sea could cost one billion and 427 million euros. Each shovel, based on the metric calculation, should cost 23 million and 850 thousand euros.
One billion and 252 million
Multiplying the cost by the 42 wind-powered skyscrapers planned in the Sulcis sea would lead to exactly one billion of expenditure. The rest of the cost is all in cables, 252 million euros and 45 million to build the offshore power station. The investment plan of the project left no room for doubt: stratospheric figures totally beyond the reach of Ichnusa Wind Power srl, the ten thousand euro company that had dared to present that wind invasion plan. According to the papers we have acquired, the operation was managed by Giuseppe Gino Carnevale, who, with his Ichnusa Wind Power srl, had set as the company name «the creation and development of floating wind farms for the production of electricity». The official partners of the original project with a share capital of 10,000 euros are precisely those companies that Eni mentions in the official note: Nicetecnology srl and 7 Seas Wind power.
Carnival & Severini
The first, also a capital of ten thousand euros, is owned by the Apulian family of the engineer Luigi Severini, while the second has as its majority shareholder Giuseppe Gino Carnevale with a paid-up capital of eighty thousand euros, of which 60 are from the Carnevale wind. , while the other 20 are of that Mr. Botha Theo Nicholas, British citizenship but domiciled in Auckland, New Zealand. They are the signatories of the colossal floating Iglesiente wind farm which now becomes the property of the state structure. The details and the time frame of the proposal leave many doubts about the operation open. In fact, Ichnusa Wind srl was born on May 31, 2019, without ever having built a wind farm on land or sea.
The question
The question is simple: why must the State, Eni and Cassa Depositi e Prestiti involve two companies that do not have any concrete experience in the matter? How do state bodies justify that definition of "Italian companies with proven experience" for two very private entities with poor capital and no real construction experience, given that no offshore wind farms are built in Italy? We are, in fact, talking about a project, never approved, and never formally presented for a completed process, where the two partners, now partners in the Eni operation, had paid just 5,000 euros to grab 50% of the shares each. shares of that offshore wind power plan. Two tiny entities, "Nicetechnology" and "7 Seas power", which declare themselves to be "start up" by statute and which suddenly become protagonists on a par with Eni, Cassa Depositi e Prestiti and the Copenhagen Infrastructure Partner of invasion of the Sulcis sea. In the press release to high finance, Eni, the Cassa Depositi e Prestiti and the "anonymous and unknown" shareholders also set a date for the start of the exploitation of the wind in that exclusive proscenium: by 2028 the wind invasion in front of the Pan di Zucchero will be operational.
