Creating an alternative to the Meloni energy model. Renzi’s ideas

On this page, we preview some excerpts from the new book by Matteo Renzi, leader of Italia Viva and former Prime Minister, which focuses on Giorgia Meloni’s years in government. “Quando c’era lei. L’Italia dopo Giorgia Meloni” (Solferino, 224 pp., 18 euros) will be available in bookshops from tomorrow.

It goes without saying that it was not Meloni who closed the Strait of Hormuz or invaded Ukraine. But it is equally clear that no issue illustrates the gap between Fratelli d’Italia’s promises and reality quite like energy. This applies to diesel and petrol, on which the Prime Minister – before arriving at Palazzo Chigi – had even filmed a video like a seasoned actress (just like her grandmother, it must be said, who was brilliant!) to announce the abolition of excise duties. It applies to all the controversies backtracked on by those who govern us, such as those against oil drilling, against the TAP, against waste-to-energy plants, and against regasification terminals. The same applies to the farce of the nuclear power advert: Minister Pichetto Fratin explained on all the major TV channels that Italy has given the green light to a return to nuclear power, but building just one mini-power station requires a minimum investment of one and a half billion euros – at the very least. Setting aside the administrative complications of a country where the Meloni government still cannot identify a site to dispose of past nuclear waste, the much-heralded ‘green light’ for nuclear power – as reported on every TV channel in the country – is in reality a measure that allocates a mere 20 million a year for three years. At this rate of funding, it is conceivable that the first power station will be ready in about 76 years – assuming, and this is by no means certain, that Pichetto Fratin manages to sort out the red tape in the meantime. This is frustrating: a measure with no funding is presented, and if everything goes well, the first nuclear power plant will be operational only in 2102, yet no one asks, ‘Hey, Government, are you taking the mickey out of us?’. Instead, self-proclaimed environmentalists are the first to be taken in, and rather than exposing the government’s incompetence, they sound the nuclear alarm. As if the right-wing had switched on the power stations: let us switch on our brains and go on the offensive, please.

Yet it is not only drilling, the TAP (how many unjustified accusations I have faced in Puglia over that blessed pipeline), nuclear power, or waste-to-energy plants (which are needed – and how they are needed: Gualtieri is right, not those who would like to shut them down) that will determine the future. A broader perspective is essential. I frequently attempt to initiate a debate on these issues, even in the company of highly influential international leaders, but I struggle to break through the media noise. If I discuss party primaries, challenge Vannacci, or appear on a podcast, I go viral. If I sign lengthy documents on energy, hardly anyone pays attention: such is the curse of the influencer era.

A few months ago, I co-signed “The Power to Compete: Europe’s Energy Reset” with Tony Blair, a document on how to revitalise Europe’s energy sector. For twenty years, in fact, Brussels has regarded energy solely as an economic policy, whereas now – all the more so following the geopolitical crises that have affected and continue to affect our main (former) suppliers – the issue must be placed back at the centre as a major matter of economic power. It is right to work towards decarbonisation, but decarbonisation must be the end result of a sound strategy, not the ideological principle to which every other choice is sacrificed. Energy must be secure; energy must be affordable. Technology must take precedence over ideology. Let us look at the reality for what it is: electricity prices in Europe are two to three times higher than in the United States and China (85 euros per industrial megawatt-hour in the EU compared with 36 in the US and 53 in China. And Italy is among the worst off). We are 58 per cent dependent on imports, and almost 50 million Europeans live in energy poverty. Over the fifteen years from 2008 to 2023, Europe’s manufacturing sector has lost – partly for this reason – more than two million jobs. And the 2025 Iberian blackout demonstrated that we face complex structural vulnerabilities in grid management that are difficult to address.

It is right to tell it like it is if we want to put forward an alternative to Brussels ahead of Italy’s six-month presidency of the European Union. We have made five serious mistakes, according to the document signed jointly with the former British Prime Minister: pushing for clean energy generation without electrifying demand; building capacity – in terms of grids, storage and firm power – faster than necessary; phasing out fossil fuel production whilst remaining dependent on it; delegating electrical engineering manufacturing to China (76 per cent of global investment in clean-tech factories by 2024); managing everything on a national basis within a physically continental system.

Do we agree on this analysis? Because this is the starting point, not the end point.

With shale gas, the United States has reinvented itself, becoming an energy-exporting nation. China has built an extraordinary economic strategy, partly due to a political model that operates without excessive constraints. Europe cannot copy either American geology or the Chinese model of government, but it can build the first integrated ‘electro-state’ on a continental scale. Hierarchy of objectives: security, expansion of supply through electrification and affordability are the enabling conditions; decarbonisation is the result. We must move beyond the era in which the Green Deal was viewed as an untouchable Holy Grail, an ideological totem to which human sacrifices were made in the form of business closures and job losses.

Not least because, as the excellent chairman of Nomisma Energia, Davide Tabarelli, tries to explain in all his public appearances, oil and gas reserves have saved us – for now – but if geopolitical complications continue to entangle the world, we will inevitably have to explore alternative solutions. If it is true – and it is true – that oil, whether we like it or not, is not on its last legs (at most, oil has a few centuries left, as industry insiders say), then managing to balance renewables and fossil fuels is a duty. Freeing renewables from ideological constraints is also a duty for the centre-left, even at regional level: there are quite a few regional governors who, in the name of the sacrosanct principle of landscape conservation, have blocked every form of renewable energy. If nuclear power isn’t acceptable, gas isn’t acceptable, oil isn’t acceptable, wind isn’t acceptable and solar isn’t acceptable, it becomes rather difficult to envisage how to build a future, doesn’t it?

On energy, whilst she was in office, election promises were not kept; the direction of travel in Europe was not changed; the block on renewables was not lifted (what has been done stems from the latest measures introduced by Draghi and Cingolani, not by Meloni); and excise duties were not abolished.

And so, in the end, we return to the Sip advertisement: “But how much do you cost me?”

The cost to the public of Giorgia Meloni’s mistakes in recent years is enormous. But the paradox is that the greatest cost lies not in what the Government has done, but in what it has failed to do. In times of such radical change, hiding behind inaction is not wisdom but dereliction of duty.