TARANTO, ITALY (AFP) – The Mediterranean’s first offshore wind farm is rising from the shallows off Italy, its turbines a symbol of hope for a Europe suffering an energy crisis exacerbated by war.

The park will stretch out from the port in Taranto, a city in the south blighted by a noxious steel plant and unemployment, but which now finds itself centre stage in the country’s race to scale up green power.

“This is a big chance to change hearts and minds on renewables,” said Fabio Matacchiera, an activist in Taranto, where child tumours are well above the average but poor locals cling to jobs in dirty energy.

The Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine in February prompted an outraged European Union to pledge to sharply reduce its dependency on Russian gas, and expand clean energy faster to compensate.

Italy is one of Europe’s biggest guzzlers of gas, which currently represents 42 per cent of its energy consumption. It imports 95 per cent of the gas it uses, 45 per cent of which comes from Russia.

An “accelerated investment in renewables… remains the only key strategy in the long term”, Prime Minister Mario Draghi told Parliament recently, with Rome planning to stop using Russian gas by 2025.

As the Ukraine conflict rages, Italy’s Cabinet has approved six new wind farms to be built on land, from Sardinia to Basilicata, and has committed to unlocking “several tens of gigawatts of offshore wind power”.

Offshore is more complicated: average water depths in the Mediterranean are much deeper than in areas such as the North Sea, making bottom-fixed installations difficult and costly.
The Mediterranean is also one of the world’s busiest waterways, as well as the sea in Europe most prone to severe climate change.

But the invention of floating turbines has increased its potential.

France recently held the world’s first auction for a commercial-sized floating offshore wind farm, and other Mediterranean countries such as Greece and Spain are also planning auctions for large-scale projects, according to the WindEurope association.

Once complete, the Beleolico farm off Taranto’s sandy beach in Puglia, down in the heel of Italy’s boot-shaped peninsula, will have 10 bottom-fixed, red and white-bladed turbines.
Together they will be capable of powering 21,000 homes.

Renexia, the company behind it, said it also has plans for a vast floating wind farm with 190 turbines off the island of Sicily, which would produce energy for 3.4 million families and create hundreds of jobs.

The project has met some opposition from locals convinced it would ruin the view in tourist hotspots – though Renexia’s general manager Riccardo Toto told AFP it would be “practically invisible” from the coast.

Treasure hunters have been known to uncover sunken ancient artefacts off Sicily, but there are none on the site in question, he said.

The turbines can also boost, rather than damage, biodiversity by acting as artificial reefs.

Italy’s Ecological Transition Ministry has received 64 expressions of interest for floating offshore wind farms – but the number of projects held up by bureaucracy is “staggering”, WindEurope said.

Beleolico, which Renexia hopes will be operational by May, has been 14 years in the making.

Greenpeace Italy head Giuseppe Onufrio slammed the delays as “absurd”.

“Some (farms) are authorised after six, seven years, and the technology changes year by year and so the risk is that plants are authorised despite being outdated.”

Draghi insists the government “is working to streamline procedures, cut red tape and speed up investments”.

But Davide Tabarelli, economics professor and head of energy think tank Nomisma Energia, told AFP he was “amazed and stupefied” to see Draghi describe renewables as the “only key strategy”.

Beleolico, a symbol of Italy’s offshore potential, “is constantly being thrown around as the immediate solution to the energy crisis, and the fact that we can do without gas, especially Russian gas”.

But there are several “serious problems”, he said, not least the difficulties storing wind energy, for suitable batteries do not exist, leading to waste.

Rome’s vow that it is readying to turn off the gas to punish the Kremlin is remarkable, he added, “as if, after 30 years of promises on renewables, the problem could be solved in the space of a few weeks”.

Scott McFetridge

DES MOINES, IOWA (AP) – For years Americans have been told autonomous technology was improving and that driverless vehicles were just around the corner.

Finally they’re here, but to catch a glimpse of them, you’ll need to go to a farm rather than look along city streets.

Beginning this fall, green 14-tonne tractors that can plow day or night with no one sitting in the cab, or even watching nearby, will come off the John Deere factory assembly line in Waterloo, Iowa, harkening the age of autonomous farming.

The development follows more than a decade-long effort by the world’s largest farm equipment manufacturer, and marks a milestone for automation advocates, who for years have been explaining why driverless cars aren’t quite ready for prime time.

“I’m glad to see they’re coming out and will stimulate the other technologies,” said Raj Rajkumar, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and an expert in autonomous cars.

Deere isn’t saying yet how much the autonomous tractors will cost but the new technology will be added onto tractors that sell for about USD500,000, said Ben Haber, a company spokesman. The company plans to operate the autonomous tractors on 10 to 50 farms by this fall before significantly increasing the number in following years.

For the past decade, the supposedly imminent debut of autonomous vehicles on city streets and freeways has been repeatedly pushed off as companies struggled to guarantee their safety.

But, Rajkumar noted, tractors have it easier because they don’t need to contend with other vehicles, pedestrians or the complexities of an urban scene. Tractors can make use of consistent GPS data, unlike cars that can lose contact travelling through tunnels or amid tall buildings.

Or as Joel Dawson, a Deere production director, put it, “You aren’t going to see a crosswalk in most cornfields in Iowa or Nebraska.”

Modern tractors already have GPS guides that handle steering and turning to ensure optimum plowing, seeding and harvesting. They also use real-time streams of data to make changes if needed because of soil conditions, the amount of fertiliser applied or other factors.

The autonomous tractor will now let farmers hook up a plow behind a tractor, start the machine with a swipe of a smart phone and then leave it to rumble up and down a field on its own.

The driverless tractors are equipped with six pairs of cameras that work like human eyes and can provide a 360-degree image. When filtered through computer algorithms, the tractor is able to determine where it is in the field and will abruptly stop if there is anything unfamiliar in its path.

Farmers often grow crops on different parcels of land that are miles apart, so while the tractor plows in one field a farmer can work at another, drive into town for supplies or spend time with their families at home. Given that less than two per cent of Americans work on farms and rural populations have dwindled for decades, the autonomous tractors also are expected to help with chronic labour shortages.

The shift to ever-more sophisticated tractors is part of a movement that emphasises planting, fertilising and harvesting during narrow windows of time when conditions are perfect. If new technology can help farmers complete a job when soil and air temperatures are just right ahead of approaching wet weather, for example, it can mean more plentiful crops months later.

“If I don’t get this field tilled today and it rains tonight, that could mean we don’t get the field planted for another week and that has real cost implications in a lot of operations,” said Ryan Berman, who works on agricultural technology issues at Iowa State University. “If you can move an extra 80 or 100 acres into that optimal window, that can be worth thousands of dollars every year, probably tens of thousands.

Still, the tractor won’t be for everyone. Ed Anderson, director of research for the Iowa Soybean Association, cited the substantial cost, and noted that some farmers prefer hands-on work rather than overseeing operations via a smartphone.

Another industry giant, CNH Industrial, also is developing autonomous capabilities for its Case and New Holland tractors, and other companies are exploring using numerous smaller autonomous machines to handle other farm work.