Wind in Italy: A Window of Opportunity

A beautiful country well known for its automotive and design industry, a land with great industrial tradition, of course we are talking about Italy.

What is underexposed is Italy’s commitment to develop renewable energy projects. There have been many renewable initiatives over the last decades, whereof most of them relate to solar pv projects. Solar energy production covered for almost 10% of Italy’s total energy consumption in 2016, making Italy the country with the highest contribution from solar energy in the world. In 2016, 17.4% of all Italian electric energy consumption was covered by renewable energy. This makes Italy one of the highest scoring countries in Western Europa considering the use of renewable energy.

Wind Energy

Next to solar pv, another established form of renewable energy in Italy is wind energy. Due to a Feed In Tariff from the Italian government many projects have started in the period between 2002 and 2017. After the incentive period expired at the end of last year many of the installed wind energy projects still run successful but a number of Italian wind projects did not perform as expected. This has resulted in the painful discovery that some of the turbines did not perform well and often came to a standstill. The main reason for this to happen is that the mass of the turbine owners did not had enough knowledge about wind turbines. On the other hand, some of the projects that were installed years ago were not properly audited by that time, hence they wore out very quickly.

Obsolete projects

The current situation for most of the turbine owners is that their turbines are not performing well and therefore not generate electricity nor money. Knowing for a fact that the duration of the Feed In Tariffs is still applicable on their projects, the turbine owners have to decide what to do with their land and their turbines. However, in most cases the turbine owners cannot invest any more money in the stagnated wind projects…..

At WES we want to help the Italian turbine owners because in many situations there is still a good business case to (re)start the wind turbines and producing money again. We are willing to invest in obsolete projects to regenerate what has come to be a disappointment.

Retrofit

WES offers to enter into a partnership with the current turbine owners providing a Retrofit turbine and a stable future income for the current landowners. WES will buy-out the current owners, take over the wind turbine project and become operator of the project. Besides the buy-out of the project WES will pay a land lease fee to the landowners on who’s land the turbines are located.

To regenerate the ever so beautiful Italian wind turbines we want to get in touch with the current turbine owners. Do you own or know any obsolete wind turbines in Italy that should once again generate renewable energy? For every wind turbine project you inform us of that is suitable for replacement WES is rewarding a finder’s fee ‘reward’ of 5.000 Euro.

Future prognosis

Probably a new Feed In Tariff will brought into force by the Italian government in the near future. The government wants to stimulate wind energy projects to accelerate the share of renewable energy penetration in Italy. Together we will achieve to reach the targets that are set for bringing back the carbon emissions and provide more people with renewable energy.