Gas and nuclear power: four years wasted

“Nuclear, oil and gas will be Italian: enough of importing energy and fuel at high prices when we have them at home.” So reads a meme circulated by Fratelli d’Italia and, apart from a few nationalistic excesses, it hits the nail on the head. Italy is one of the countries most vulnerable to global crises because it is poor in natural resources. So, it is all very well to step up the pace on renewables, as the centre-left is also calling for: but it makes no sense to deprive ourselves of domestic sources (such as oil and gas, of which we have decent reserves) and nuclear power (which in countries such as Spain and France forms the backbone of the electricity system). The problem is that, in both cases, these are not solutions that will help in the immediate term: it takes time to bring new hydrocarbon fields into production, and even longer to build nuclear power stations.

One might be tempted to say: why didn’t they think of this sooner! Except that the current ruling coalition had, in fact, thought of it – or at least that is what they claimed during the 2022 election campaign: we were in the midst of the Ukraine crisis, and Giorgia Meloni, Matteo Salvini and Silvio Berlusconi were promising a revolution in our energy policy. Had the government acted straight away, doing what it had secured broad support for, we would be closer to our goal today and, perhaps, better able to weather the impact of the upheaval in the Middle East. Moreover, the political landscape would have been very different: the distance from the elections – which are now just around the corner – would have brought the pro-nuclear element of the broad coalition into sharper relief. Furthermore, Minister Gilberto Pichetto Fratin could have continued the work on gas production permits begun by the Draghi government (with the support of the PD and the M5S), expanding and accelerating the granting of production licences. Instead, for all these years, the centre-right has dithered, avoiding the most contentious issues (such as the ban on gas extraction in the Northern Adriatic), for fear of local backlash. Today, what could have been a sound energy policy appears to be an election promise that has come too late.