🇺🇸 미국 · "OUTSIDERS" · 총 8건
필터 보기현재 지수
50.0
0 = 부정 우세
50 = 중립
100 = 긍정 우세
최근 7일 기준 10,505건을 분석한 결과, 뉴스 심리지수는 50.0(균형)입니다. 긍정 1건(0.0%)·중립 10,503건(100.0%)·부정 1건(0.0%)이며, 중립 비중이 뚜렷하게 높습니다. 성향 지수는 종합 19.3(중도 균형)입니다.
Democratic Party leadership loses control as socialist candidates like Graham Platner and Adam Hamawy win primaries, signaling a major leftward shift.
Jim Barne and Kit Buchan were terrified of being outed as frauds. After all, they were two very British writers creating a very New York musical. And they’d only ever been to the Big Apple as tourists. Turns out, they needn’t worry about appearing as outsiders. Their deep admiration of and fascination with the city […]
“Not in my backyard” is the rallying cry of citizens everywhere resisting projects proposed for their locality. Whether it’s affordable housing, a waste treatment plant, or a new data center, they may recognize the benefit of the activity. They just don’t want it near them. And the roots of that resistance differ from place to place. When it comes to the ongoing transition from fossil fuels to renewables, companies and policymakers need to know where, exactly, people are coming from. The Italian island of Sardinia is a textbook example. As IEEE Spectrum’s power and energy editor Emily Waltz discovered when she traveled there last October, Sardinian opposition to wind and solar projects runs deep. It spurred a quarter of the voting population to queue up in public squares in 2024 to sign a petition banning all construction of renewable energy. Waltz was surprised. She went there to see a promising new grid-scale energy storage system that uses domes inflated with carbon dioxide. While reporting on that project, she interviewed residents, engineers, activists, and professors about their attitudes toward climate change and the Italian government’s grand plans for renewable energy on the island. And Waltz soon learned of Sardinians’ profound antipathy toward renewable energy and its deep ties to a history of invasion, occupation, and exploitation stretching back 2,700 years. It started with the Phoenicians and then extended through the Romans, the Byzantines, and the Iberians. Sardinia was absorbed into a newly unified Italy in 1861, and it became an autonomous region of Italy in 1948. The island’s population is justifiably suspicious of outsiders, including the Italian government. “When you’re in Sardinia, the weight of history—you can feel it like in the air,” Waltz told me. “And it gets passed down from one generation to the next.” Now, Italy needs Sardinia to produce even more power to meet the country’s climate goals—something that Sardinians see as Rome’s problem, not theirs. “Sardinia already exports about 30 percent of its electricity. It’s not like they need more,” Waltz says. “So it’s hard to make the case to build, build, build.” The result of Waltz’s old-fashioned shoe leather reporting is this month’s cover story. She notes that the Sardinians she talked to aren’t climate-change deniers, and they don’t object to renewables per se. They just don’t like the way corporations and Italian policymakers are trying to plug into Sardinia like it’s one giant battery rather than the home of an ancient and proud people. “I think Sardinians would be more receptive to renewable projects if it was more of a ground-up, grassroots approach,” Waltz says. Indeed, this homegrown approach is already working in some places in Sardinia. She knows of more than 50 projects, called energy communities, where the residents are deploying renewables themselves. The idea also holds promise for other places struggling to get locals to buy into the renewable-energy transition. The Sardinian experience is both a cautionary tale and a blueprint. Ignore the weight of history that communities carry and your project risks failure. Meet the people where they are and you might just get somewhere. The same lesson applies whether you’re in Sulawesi or sub-Saharan Africa. You just have to show up to learn it.
Steve Hilton says momentum behind his California governor campaign and Spencer Pratt's LA mayor bid shows voter hunger for political outsiders.
The main characters on HBO’s “Industry” — Harper (Myha’la), Eric (Ken Leung), Yasmin (Marisa Abela), Rishi (Sagar Radia) and even Sweetpea (Miriam Petche) — are a band of outsiders in the conservative (e.g. white man’s world) of finance. A Black American woman, a Chinese-American man, a media heiress of Lebanese descent, a South Asian bro […]
President Trump has helped lead Republicans’ shift from criticizing Islamist extremism to portraying Muslims as security risks and culturally incompatible outsiders.
For years, the field of robotics has used the terms “dull, dirty, and dangerous” (DDD) to describe the types of tasks or jobs where robots might be useful—by doing work that’s undesirable for people. A classic example of a DDD job is one of “repetitive physical labor on a steaming hot factory floor involving heavy machinery that threatens life and limb.” But determining which human activities fit into these categories is not as straightforward as it seems. What exactly is a “dull” task, and who makes that assumption? Is “dirty” work just about needing to wash your hands afterwards, or is there also an aspect of social stigma? What data can we rely on to classify jobs as “dangerous?” Our recent work (which was not dull at all) tackles these questions and proposes a framework to help roboticists understand the job context for our technology. First, we did an empirical analysis of robotics publications between 1980 and 2024 that mention DDD and found that only 2.7 percent define DDD and only 8.7 percent provide examples of tasks or jobs. The definitions vary, and many of the examples aren’t particularly specific (for example, “industrial manufacturing,” “home care”). Next, we reviewed the social science literature in anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, and sociology to develop better definitions for “dull,” “dirty,” and “dangerous” work. Again, while it might seem intuitive which tasks to put into these buckets, it turns out that there are some underlying social, economic, and cultural factors that matter. Dangerous Work: Occupations or tasks that result in injury or risk of harm It’s possible to measure the danger of a task or job by using reported information. There are administrative records and surveys that provide numbers on occupational injury rates and hazardous risk factors. While that seems straightforward, it’s important to understand how this data was collected, reported, and verified. First, occupational injuries tend to be underreported, with some studies estimating up to 70 percent of cases missing in administrative databases. Second, injuries and risk factors are rarely disaggregated by characteristics like gender, migration status, formal/informal employment, and work activities. For example, because most personal protective equipment—such as masks, vests, and gloves—are sized for men, women in dangerous work environments face increased safety risks. These caveats are an opportunity for robotics to be helpful. If we went out and looked for it, we could probably find some less obviously dangerous work where robotics might be an important intervention, not to mention some groups that are disproportionately affected and would benefit from more workplace safety. Dirty Work: Occupations or tasks that are physically, socially, or morally tainted Colloquially, most people might think of dirty work as involving physical dirtiness, such as trash removal, cleaning, or dealing with hazardous substances. But social science literature makes clear that dirty work is also about stigma. Socially tainted jobs are often servile or involve interacting with stigmatized groups (for example, correctional officers), and morally tainted jobs include tasks that people commonly perceive as sinful, deceptive, or otherwise defying norms of civility (like a stripper or a collection agent). “Dirty work” is a social construct that can vary across time (like tattoo industry stigma in the United States) and culture (such as nursing in the U.S. versus in Bangladesh). One way to measure whether work is “dirty” is by using the closely related concept of occupational prestige, captured through quantitative surveys where people rank jobs. Another way to measure it is through qualitative data, like ethnographies and interviews. Similar to “dangerous,” we see some hidden opportunities for robotics in “dirty” work. But one of our more interesting takeaways from the data is that a lower-ranked job can be something that the workers themselves enjoy or find immense pride and meaning in. If we care about what tasks are truly undesirable, understanding this worker perspective is important. Dull Work: Occupations or tasks that are repetitive and lacking in autonomy When it comes to defining dull work, what matters most is workers’ own experiences. Outsiders can make a lot of false assumptions about what tasks have value and meaning. Sometimes things that seem boring or routine create the right conditions for developing skills and competence, such as the concentration needed for woodworking, or for socializing and support, when tasks are done alongside others. Instead of assuming that repetitive work is negative, it’s important to examine qualitative data on how people experience the work and what purpose it serves for them. DDD: An actionable framework In our paper, we propose a framework to help the robotics community explore how automation impacts individual jobs. For each term—dull, dirty, and dangerous—the framework gathers key pieces of information to reflect on what physical or social aspects of the task are, in fact, DDD. Worker perspective is an important part of all three considerations. The framework also emphasizes awareness of context—meaning the physical and social environment of an occupation and industry that can influence the DDD nature of a task. Our corresponding worksheet suggests existing data sources to draw on and encourages us to seek out multiple perspectives and consider potential sources of bias in the information. What makes tasks dull, dirty, or dangerous depends on the perspective of the humans doing those tasks.RAI Let’s take, for example, the waste and recycling industry. The world generates over 2 billion tonnes of waste annually, and this figure is expected to rise to nearly 4 billion tonnes by 2050. Intuitively, trash collection seems like a job that hits all the Ds. Going through our worksheet, we confirm that globally, workers in this industry face significant health hazards (dangerous), and waste collection is ranked as a low-status job (dirty), although interestingly, many workers take pride in providing this essential service. The job is also repetitive, but there are aspects that make it not dull. Specifically, workers cite the day-to-day interaction with their coworkers (which includes extensive insider vocabulary, work hacks, and mutual aid groups) and task variety as two of the most enjoyable aspects of the job. Task variety includes inspecting their vehicle and equipment, driving their truck, coordinating with crew members, lifting bins and bags, detecting incorrect sorting of waste, and unloading at the end destination. This finding matters because some types of robotic solutions will eliminate the parts of the job that workers most appreciate. For instance, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) recommends the adoption of automated side loader trucks and collision avoidance systems. This innovation increases safety, which is great, but it also results in a sole worker operating a joystick in a cab, surrounded by sensor and camera surveillance. Instead, we should challenge ourselves to think of solutions that make jobs safer without making them terrible in a different way. To do this, we need to understand all aspects of what makes a job dull, dirty, or dangerous (or not). Our framework aims to facilitate this understanding. Finally, it’s important to note that DDD is only one of many possible approaches to classify what work might be better served by robots. There are lots of ways we could think about which types of tasks or jobs to automate (for example, economic impact or environmental sustainability). Given the popularity of DDD in robotics, we chose this common phrase as a starting point. We would love to see more work in this space, whether it’s data collection on DDD itself or the creation of other frameworks. At RAI, we believe that the fusion of robotics and social sciences opens a whole new world of information, perspectives, opportunities, and value. It fosters a culture of curiosity and mutual learning, and allows us to create actionable tools for anyone in robotics who cares about societal impact. Dull, Dirty, Dangerous: Understanding the Past, Present, and Future of a Key Motivation for Robotics, by Nozomi Nakajima, Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar, Caitrin Lynch, and Kate Darling from the RAI Institute, was presented at the 21st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) in Edinburgh, Scotland.
“Why are you here?” Fabrizio Pilo, an electrical engineer, 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. I’d just stepped off my flight 2 hours prior and come straight to this meeting, 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 want to understand why that is. I tell Pilo, who is vice rector for innovation at the University of Cagliari, that I hope he’ll share some insights before I head out on a reporting trip across the island. (My answer seems to satisfy him, and he kindly gives me an hour of his time). This won’t be the first time that I’m asked to explain my presence on the island. I’d expected it, to some extent; I’m a foreign journalist poking around, after all. What I didn’t expect was the depth of Sardinians’ distrust, not just of journalists, but of any outsider, particularly ones with authority. Over the last few years, developers of wind and solar projects, most of whom aren’t from here, have been absorbing the bulk of this smoldering, communal wariness. Activists Maria Grazia Demontis [left] 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 actions through their organization Gallura Coordination. Luigi Avantaggiato In fact, 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, says Elisa Sotgiu, a literary sociologist at the University of Oxford, who was born and raised on the island. “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,” she says. “And yet the thing people are demonstrating against is renewable energy.” And 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 egging it on, 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 seeded a deep sense of suspicion and vulnerability. Resistance, I learn, is part of what it means to be Sardinian. Fabrizio Giulio Luca Pilo, vice rector of innovation at the University of Cagliari, has been working to help Sardinia transition to cleaner, more reliable energy. Luigi Avantaggiato “It is a very sad situation,” Pilo tells me. “There are a lot of economic reasons to do the [energy] transition.” It could attract new companies such as data centers, which would create new jobs, he argues. It could reduce Sardinia’s reliance on imported gas and fuel, making the island more independent. New economic activity on the island might help reverse its population decline, he adds. And while what’s happening on Sardinia is unique, it also represents a larger trend: A growing number of communities around the world are opposing wind- and solar-farm construction, to the consternation of stakeholders. By 2025, nearly one-fourth of the counties in the United States had enacted some impediment to new utility-scale wind and solar energy—up from as few as 15 percent two years earlier, according to a USA Today analysis. In Africa, community pushback successfully canceled major projects such as the 60-megawatt Kinangop Wind Park in Kenya. In India, local pastoralists are challenging the 13-gigawatt Ladakh solar and wind project. And the European Union’s top-down push for renewable energy has created opposition in many communities. Their reasons vary—land-use preferences, generational ethos, government resentment, property values, economic effects, aesthetics—but all of these struggles have this in common: The resisters are passionate and they are often successful in blocking development. This is a looming problem for the energy transition. Unlike large, centralized coal and nuclear power plants, renewable energy is geographically spread out, so it touches far more communities. Sardinia offers one of the clearest cases of what can go wrong when renewable-energy developers and authorities fail to consider the complexities of the local situation on the ground. Why is Sardinia resisting renewable energy? Roughly the size of New Hampshire, Sardinia juts out of the Mediterranean Sea about 200 kilometers west of Italy’s mainland. Technically it’s part of Italy, but Sardinians are quick to point out their island’s autonomous status—a subtle way of saying, “We do things our way.” Its mountains seem to echo the sentiment. With the highest peaks running in a chain along the east side of the island, Sardinia resolutely turns its back to the mainland. At first glance, the island looks like the kind of place that’s ripe for an energy transition. Its two coal plants are aging and are targeted to be shut down to meet climate commitments. It has no nuclear power, nor does it produce its own natural gas. Wind and sun, however, are abundant and could easily meet the energy needs of Sardinia’s sparse population of about 1.5 million. But while the resources may be ready for a transition, the people emphatically are not. When I first arrive in Sardinia and take in its beauty, I assume that the impetus behind the fight against wind and solar farms boils down to how they look. Waves of silicon, metal, and concrete would spoil views of Sardinia’s stunning beaches, rugged mountains, ancient pastures, and idyllic medieval villages, after all. Residents of the city of Orgosolo in 1969 famously stopped the construction of a military firing range on communal grazing land known as Pratobello. Its village walls are still covered in murals advocating social protest and antiauthoritarianism. Luigi Avantaggiato But the island’s aesthetic—and the tourism industry that depends on it—are only part of the equation. The far stronger cultural forces at play are rooted in Sardinia’s past. Over millennia, the island has endured successive invasions from outsiders seeking to exploit the land. These incursions, and Sardinians’ rebellious responses to them, have become an integral part of the island’s identity passed down through generations. The invasions started with the relatively peaceful settlement of the Phoenicians in the 9th and 8th centuries B.C.E. Then came the Romans, the Byzantines, and the Iberians, who conquered with violence, looting, and enslavement. But legend has it that despite the might of these ancient conquerors, pockets of Sardinia sometimes managed to defend themselves. “Not even the Roman empire could conquer the shepherds of the highland regions,” is the oft-repeated tale. Whether that’s true or just an idealization is beside the point; such stories serve as an enormous source of pride and identity. Sardinia exported about 30 percent of the electricity it generated in 2025, largely to Corsica and the Italian mainland via two existing submarine cables. The island is “fiercely proud of its identity…especially in the center of Sardinia, which was the most resistant part,” says Andrea Vargiu, a sociologist at the University of Sassari in Sardinia. “This long history of exploitation is still in our DNA, along with a proud sense of autonomy,” he says. Sardinia’s unification, in the mid-1800s, with what would become the Kingdom of Italy is seen by many as an act of colonization. It didn’t help that Italy then proceeded to exploit Sardinia’s forests and other resources for the benefit of the mainland—a practice that continued through the 20th century, says Vargiu. Sardinian bandits sometimes fought back with their own sense of justice, settling matters through raids, kidnappings, and violence. Their stories live on in Sardinian lore with an almost mythical quality, the brigands admired for their intractability. Pasquale Mereu, mayor of Orgosolo, helped organize the Pratobello 24 movement against renewable energy in Sardinia. Luigi Avantaggiato Italy’s use of the island for military purposes particularly irked locals. In a famous case in 1969, residents of the town of Orgosolo successfully thwarted the construction of a firing range on communal grazing land known as Pratobello. That name has since become synonymous with the defense of one’s territory, and a rallying cry. “Sardinia has always been a land of conquest,” says Pasquale Mereu, mayor of Orgosolo, who spoke with IEEE Spectrum through an interpreter. “We believe that even today we are still a colony of Italy, and I’m not ashamed to say it even though I represent an institution.” A longstanding mural on one of his village’s walls reads: “You are in the territory of Orgosolo; here the people rule supreme and the government obeys.” Sardinia’s History Shapes its Identity Driving around the island and talking to people, I can feel the weight of Sardinia’s history—and people’s propensity for holding onto it. Elaborate heritage festivals occur nearly every autumn weekend in the island’s interior. They’re well attended, multigenerational affairs that aim to keep old traditions alive. In the medieval town of Belvì, men roast chestnuts—marroni—over an open fire in a frying pan the size of a swimming pool and then serve them to the crowd by shoveling them into troughs. They’re delicious. In an adjacent amphitheater, the crowd sways along to costumed performers leading traditional dances. Then there are the Bronze Age stone structures, called nuraghi, that are pretty much everywhere. Built before the violent conquests, these conical towers have come to symbolize a romanticized vision of the heyday of Sardinia’s independence. More than 7,000 of them remain, ranging from unremarkable piles of rocks to complex towers, each one carefully documented on an interactive online map. I visit one of the more intact ones that’s fenced off and requires an admission fee. As I take some video with my phone, an employee asks me who I am and what I’m doing and informs me I’ll need to get permission from the government before posting anything online. This rock hollowed out by erosion and walled up with stones was likely used by shepherds as a shelter near the historic Sardinian village of Tempio Pausania. Luigi Avantaggiato But in interviews with residents, I’m continually reminded of the darker side of Sardinia’s past. People often bring up painful things that happened 50 or 500 years ago. A middle school science teacher named Giannina Serpi, and her husband, Roberto Moro, meet me at a café in the seaside town of Sant’Antioco. When I ask why people are so opposed to renewable energy, they (like many people I interviewed) point to the 1970s. Sheep return from pasture in Bonorva, Sardinia, near the Bonorva wind farm operated by EDF Renewables. Luigi Avantaggiato That decade brought a new kind of exploitation: not by empires or governments, but by technology companies. Petrochemical, aluminum, and other industrial companies from overseas built factories on the island, creating jobs and adjacent businesses. But after a few decades, economic and geopolitical factors led the companies to close the factories, sinking local economies and in some cases leaving behind toxic contamination. In the northern city of Porto Torres, several petrochemical plants, a thermoelectric power plant, and an industrial harbor employed about 8,000 workers in the early 1970s. But the oil crises of that decade took its toll on jobs, and when environmental contamination became evident in the 1990s, employment plunged further. By 2010, most of the petrochemical plants had closed. Studies show that residents of Porto Torres during that time had curiously high rates of death from cancer, although there is no consensus on the cause. Similarly, studies have found higher rates of lead in children in the Portovesme area in the southwest, about a 20-minute drive from where I sit with Serpi and Moro in Sant’Antioco. There, the U.S. aluminum producer Alcoa operated a smelter that employed about 500 people and supported an estimated 1,500 adjacent jobs. But the company shut down the smelter in 2012. Three years earlier, Russian aluminum manufacturer Rusal had idled its Eurallumina factory nearby. The impacts of these events still feel fresh, Serpi explains through a digital translator. She says she teaches this history to her students but doesn’t tell them how to feel about it. “I let them decide,” she says. Energy Colonialism in Sardinia Against this backdrop, renewable-energy developers in the early 2010s began sizing up Sardinia. They were drawn by the cheap land, low population, strong wind, and sun that shines an average of about 300 days a year. EF Solare Italia commissioned an 11-MW solar plant in 2010. Rome-based Enel Green Power began construction of a 90-MW wind farm in Portoscuso the following year. Other developers followed, and they mostly came from elsewhere—mainland Italy, Europe, and later, China. The way many Sardinians saw it, the new plants didn’t bring many long-lasting jobs. Most of the work ended after the design and installation phases, and profits went back to the companies’ headquarters outside of Sardinia, they argued. People called it “energy colonialism” and lauded landowners who refused to sell or lease their property to developers. Pink granite called Ghiandone Limbara was extracted from the Sinnada quarry in northern Sardinia from the late 1970s to 2011. Luigi Avantaggiato The uncle of Oxford’s Sotgiu is one of those landowners. She says that a couple of years ago a solar company asked him if he would allow the installation of an array on his family farm in Logudoro in Sardinia’s interior. “From that, he would have gotten something around €150,000 a year, which is more money than he’s seen in his life,” says Sotgiu. The money could have covered his three kids’ college education, she says. “But he refused.” He had many reasons. For one, switching from sheep grazing to the more passive business of leasing land would have put the fate of his income in the hands of an outsider. “If you deprive a region of any sort of economy that is self-reliant, then it’s really fragile,” says Sotgiu. Her uncle didn’t trust that the income would last, and worried he’d be left with a ruined farm, she says. Plus, his farm has been in the family for generations and one of his sons is interested in continuing the business. “So I understand his pride in saying, ‘No, this is my farm, I don’t care about the money,’” she says. Sardinia has one of the largest carbon footprints per capita in Europe. Despite that kind of grassroots resistance, development continued. In 2023, the Italian government authorized the construction of a 1-GW submarine power cable to connect Sardinia to Sicily and the Italian mainland. When completed, the bidirectional cable, called the Tyrrhenian Link, will increase electricity exchange between the regions, bolster grid reliability, and help grid operators efficiently use more renewable energy. Sardinian activists, however, view the cable as a way to justify even more construction of wind and solar plants, and to export the island’s energy for the benefit of non-Sardinians. The island already exports about 30 percent of its electricity, largely to Corsica and the Italian mainland via two existing submarine cables. The Florinas wind farm, commissioned in 2004, was one of the earliest wind farms built in Sardinia. Luigi Avantaggiato And then came the tipping point. In June 2024, in an effort to meet the European Union’s 2030 renewable energy targets, Italy committed to building more than 80 GW of new wind and solar energy capacity over December 2020 levels. The national government divvied up the burden among its regions and told Sardinia to build its portion, 6.2 GW. The move triggered an onslaught of requests from wind and solar developers wanting to build projects in Sardinia. The queue at one point topped 50 GW of grid-connection requests. That represented more than 700 solar and wind projects, many of which came from companies outside of Sardinia. The southern newspaper L’Unione Sarda ran wild with the numbers. Almost daily, for months, it published stories about the “wind assault.” The call-to-arms posts urged people to protest. “The Attack on the Landscape Does Not Stop; The Threat From Agrivoltaics Is Growing,” read a July 2024 headline. Unsubstantiated articles tried to link wind and solar developers to organized crime. “It was scaremongering,” says Sotgiu. “It was a little dishonest, as I saw it, because they kept exaggerating and scaring people into thinking that we were going to be invaded.” (Representatives of the newspaper declined to comment.) The numbers did scare people. Lost was the fact that a grid-connection request is just the start of a multiyear process that involves permitting and legal review and often ends in withdrawn or downsized projects. Submitting a request is inexpensive, and developers often cast a wide net by entering lots of these queues globally to increase the odds of being accepted. In the end, only a fraction come to fruition. In other words, building all, or even most, of the requested 50 GW was never going to happen. “I tried to explain this” to the public, says an industrial engineer at the University of Cagliari, in Sardinia, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid any detrimental impacts of speaking out. “I went to the regional television station. But it’s difficult with technical information. And the newspaper communication is so bad, and its impact is so strong in the community, that it’s very difficult to change people’s minds,” he says. Pratobello 2024 and Anti-Wind Protests And so the collective angst caused by powerful outsiders, industry, and the state united Sardinians into a singular cause. Faced with what felt like another attempted conquest, they did what their families and community had taught them to do: They resisted. Says Mereu: “This is what we are rebelling against: the idea that Sardinians are few and therefore must put up with everything.” In a nod to the 1969 resistance in Orgosolo, they dubbed the movement “Pratobello 2024.” Activist groups, called “committees,” organized protests, and created social media campaigns and videos. Thousands of people started showing up at planned demonstrations. A lawyer went on a hunger strike. Vandals unscrewed bolts on wind turbine blades and set fire to grid and construction equipment. Italy’s transmission system operator, Terna, had to switch to company cars without logos to avoid being targeted. Students studying the electricity system in a master’s program sponsored by Terna were verbally attacked at an airport, according to a professor at their school who spoke with me about the violence. Celebrities got involved. Italian actress and Bond Girl Caterina Murino met with Sardinia’s president to ask her to reject wind farms. Murino posted on Instagram: “Nobody touch Sardinia!!!!” On Italian national TV, the jazz legend Paolo Fresu performed on trumpet while popular TV host Geppi Cucciari read an impassioned lament about the exploitation of the island. Sardinian author Erre Push penned a graphic novel titled Fàula Birdi about a protagonist who resisted an imposition from outsiders. He wrote it upon the request of the activist group ReCommon, whose mission is to “challenge corporate and state power responsible for the plunder of territories.” Push hopes the book will inspire more people to follow the protagonist’s lead. “Renewables are another imposition like in the past—not to help Sardinians but to help external people like industry managers or founders of companies,” he told me through an interpreter. Concerned about the influx of solar and wind farms being built in Sardinia by outsiders, Roberto Pusceddu, under his pen name Erre Push, published a graphic novel that aimed to inspire young people to resist such impositions. Luigi Avantaggiato Mereu and a network of mayors drafted the petition that gathered so many signatures. The people had spoken. In response, Sardinian politicians passed a law that imposed an 18-month ban on construction of wind and solar projects within 7 km of a nuraghe or other archeological site. It wasn’t a total ban, but it might as well have been. “If you put a circle with a 7-km radius around each archeological site, you cover all of Sardinia,” says Emilio Ghiani, a power systems expert at the University of Cagliari. “In this way, it is impossible to find a place to install a new plant.” The move was like giving the Italian government—and the EU’s clean energy targets—the middle finger. And it sent renewable-energy developers scrambling. One company building an agriphotovoltaic plant raced to bring construction to 30 percent completion, which the new law said was the threshold for being allowed to proceed. The company asked not to be named in this story to avoid trouble. Furious, the government in Rome challenged the Sardinian regional law in Italy’s Constitutional Court, and in January this year it prevailed. In its decision, the court rejected the law, saying that renewable-energy projects should be evaluated case by case. Project development quickly resumed. So did the backlash. A headline in L’Unione Sarda declared: “Enough With Top-Down Decisions Without Consulting Communities.” Sardinia’s Renewable Energy Conflict Where the island goes from here is unclear. There’s a willingness among a portion of the population to move forward with an energy transition. For example, some of Sardinia’s largest cheese makers are powering their operations with renewable energy and installing systems to utilize waste heat for efficiency. But for the most part, the public isn’t budging in its resistance. Researchers are trying to dispel inaccurate information, but regional newspapers seem bent on perpetuating fear. Plus, there are technical issues to work out before a full-scale energy transition can be made. Sardinia’s transmission system was built around the centralized generation of two coal plants; it wasn’t made for the distributed generation of wind and solar plants. Renewables require a more dynamic grid, more energy storage, and a wider range of power sources to compensate for their intermittency. Engineers are working on it, but they’ve got a ways to go. The new Tyrrhenian Link undersea power cable will help with that. By connecting Sardinia, Sicily, and the mainland, the cable creates more flexibility in the system. When wind or solar generation slows in Sardinia, for example, electricity from the mainland can fill in the gap, and vice versa. “It will increase the reliability of the system, and after it’s installed, it will be possible to switch off the old generation plants that use coal,” says Ghiani. In January, Terna finished laying the western section of the cable between Sardinia and Sicily, and in April it completed the eastern section between Sicily and Campania on the mainland. Doing so set a world record for power cable depth, at 2,150 meters below sea level, according to Terna. Italy originally ordered Sardinia’s two coal plants to shut down by 2025 but later extended the deadline to 2038. The link is one of the most innovative high-voltage direct current (HVDC) projects in Europe. It can move up to a gigawatt of power and reverse that power flow nearly instantaneously. By using voltage source converter (VSC) technology, it can also help prevent power-flow problems by regulating frequency and smoothing out oscillations in the grid in real time. And it has black-start capability: In the event of a shutdown, it can help restore the grid without relying on an external electric network. These features are particularly helpful for an isolated network like Sardinia’s. Italy has created new incentives and regulations to build a market for grid-scale energy storage. Having plenty of storage is a key to scaling up renewables because it provides backup power when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining. To this end, Italy created MACSE, an auction that gives storage developers revenue certainty. Its name translates to mechanism for the procurement of electricity storage capacity. The first auction round, in September, successfully awarded 10 GWh. Energy experts in Sardinia are also working with policymakers to change the rules around grid-connection requests. But these kinds of nerdy details don’t grace most household conversations. Industrial Sites Host Energy Storage Something more accessible that the public can get behind is building renewables on Sardinia’s abandoned industrial sites. “To be honest, not everything is so beautiful here. We have a lot of industrial areas where you can place PV panels. We have a lot of rooftops,” electrical engineer Pilo says. “We have unused coal mines.” I visit one such project that’s proceeding with local support—or at least without much opposition. It’s a coal mine near Gonnesa that shut down in 2018 and is now being turned into a data center and a pumped-hydro energy storage system. The plan is to move water through the mine’s vertical geometry via an enclosed membrane—like a soft pipe—and use the flow to turn a turbine that generates electricity. The water then gets pumped back to the surface and stored in pear-shaped vessels above ground. The scheme will help power the data center, which will be built both above and below ground, including in the mine’s largest chambers nearly 500 meters below the Earth’s surface. Energy Vault will remove old mining equipment from the Carbosulcis coal mine near Gonnesa to make way for an underground data center [above]. It will be powered by a pumped-hydro energy storage system that flows through the mine’s vertical geometry and stores water in above-ground tanks [top].Luigi Avantaggiato Energy storage developer Energy Vault is building it, and despite being based in Lugano, Switzerland—that is, not Sardinia—the company seems to have avoided protest. It helps that the mine is owned by Carbosulcis, a Sardinian regional-government-owned company, which is calling the shots on the project. Plus, doing nothing with the mine costs money. The mine closed eight years ago because it wasn’t profitable, but Carbosulcis must continue maintaining it because of its high methane emissions, which require monitoring and ventilation to prevent explosions and leaks. Carbosulcis managers figured that if they’re going to continue putting money and personnel into the mine, they might as well do something useful with it, Luca Manzella, vice president for Europe, Middle East, and Africa at Energy Vault, says as he and I tour the mine. An innovative project in Sardinia’s interior—Energy Dome’s grid-scale carbon dioxide battery—seems to be avoiding protest as well. Built in a gated industrial complex near Ottana, this energy-storage facility looks like a giant bubble—the kind that fits over a stadium or tennis complex. It’s filled with carbon dioxide that is compressed to store 200 MWh of electricity for the grid. Although the bubble is visible from several of the surrounding hillside villages, and although the developer is headquartered on the mainland, there’s little sign of public pushback. Energy Dome began operating its 20-megawatt, long-duration energy-storage facility in July 2025 in Ottana, Sardinia. In partnership with Google, the company this year aims to build replicas of the system on multiple continents.Luigi Avantaggiato Another path forward is through “energy communities.” In this grassroots approach, consumers work together to build their own solar plant or other power generation. Dozens of these communities are already active on the island, according to the Sardinian Electricity Association, a group that provides guidance to consumers. But by far the greatest need is for energy developers and authorities to understand the people and the history of the land on which they want to build. “When Europe or the national government make a law, they have to also consider the background of Sardinian people and why they are so afraid,” says Simone Micheletti, CEO at Futura Group, a renewable-energy developer based in Serramanna, Sardinia. “You cannot apply the same law to Sweden and Sicily. Sometimes you need to understand [the situation] locally,” he says. Decision makers everywhere would be wise to listen. Otherwise, they may suffer the same fate as their counterparts in Sardinia: despised by locals, delayed by politics, and surprised at how badly it all went. Special thanks to Luigi Avantaggiato for interpreting and additional reporting. This story was updated on 13 May, 2026 to correct the percentage of electricity that Sardinia exports.