- Wind power and the mob: 'We're gonna make you a windmill you can't refuse'
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The Financial Times reports that -- apart from being expensive, unreliable and dependent on government subsidies -- wind power can be dangerous to your kneecaps. In Siciliy (where else?) there are suspicions the mob is behind a number of wind-power projects, lured by the easy money on offer from government:
Multinationals are starting to find out something that is well known to Italian investors: that concealed beneath Europe’s most generous system of incentives – supported by “green credits” that industrial polluters have to purchase – there exists a web of corruption and shady deals.
Rossana Interlandi, recently appointed head of Sicily’s environment department, explains that project developers – she calls them “speculators” – were also lured by the appeal of a law that obliges Italy’s national grid operator to pay wind farm owners even when they are not producing electricity.
Several are under investigation, either for shoddy construction or suspected corruption in their approval. But with subsidies flowing, applications keep flooding in.
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