Why Sardinia Rejects Renewable Energy Despite Economic Struggles

“Why are you here?” Fabrizio Pilo, an electrical engineer and vice rector for innovation at the University of Cagliari, asks me as we sit in an outdoor café near his home in Cagliari, an ancient city on the island of Sardinia.

It’s a fair question. I’m a journalist from the United States who had just arrived on the island two hours earlier. I came straight to this meeting with my suitcase still stowed in my rental car.

I’m here to see three intriguing new energy projects under development in Sardinia. I’d heard there’s strong public resistance to renewable energy, and I wanted to understand why. I told Pilo that I hoped he’d share some insights before I began a reporting trip across the island. My answer seemed to satisfy him, and he kindly gave me an hour of his time.

This wasn’t the first time I was asked to explain my presence on the island. I had expected it to some extent; after all, I’m a foreign journalist poking around. What I didn’t expect was the depth of Sardinians’ distrust—not just of journalists, but of any outsider, particularly those with authority.

Over the last few years, developers of wind and solar projects, most of whom aren’t from Sardinia, have absorbed the bulk of this communal wariness. Activists Maria Grazia Demontis and Alberto Sala, photographed inside the archaeological monument Giants’ Tomb of Pascarédda, have worked to stop the construction of wind farms by organizing protests and taking legal action through their organization Gallura Coordination.

The resistance is so widespread among Sardinians that, over the course of two months in 2024, a grassroots petition to ban new wind and solar projects gathered over 210,000 certified signatures. That’s more than a quarter of Sardinia’s typical voter turnout and represents a cross-party consensus. People stood in long lines in public squares to sign. And it worked: Political leaders responded swiftly with an 18-month moratorium on renewable energy construction.

“I’ve never seen so much engagement for anything” in Sardinia

“Sardinia has a bunch of problems like enormous unemployment. There’s lots of emigration because there are no jobs. It’s one of the poorest areas in Europe. The area is just decaying. And yet the thing people are demonstrating against is renewable energy.”

Elisa Sotgiu, a literary sociologist at the University of Oxford who was born and raised on the island, made this observation.

The opposition continues: A network of mayors has mobilized for the cause. Thousands of people show up at organized protests. Activists vandalize grid equipment. Families are passing down these stories of resistance to their children as a point of pride. Local media outlets are fueling the movement, frequently publishing misinformation tinged with fearmongering.

These aren’t just NIMBY complaints—not in the pejorative sense, at least. The resistance, and the distrust underlying it, is rooted in the island’s complex history, both recent and ancient. It’s based on a past that the Sardinian people carry with them—a past that has shaped their deep-seated skepticism toward outside interference.