by Caroline Rennie
How do you know that your avant garde initiatives are actually mainstream?
The Mafia is muscling in as a supplier…
According to the Financial Times, renewable energy, particularly wind-farms, is increasingly owned and run by the Mafia – for the value of the subsidies, for the value of the renewable energy credits, and for the sale of the energy.
Some more legitimate firms got there too. But most companies have been content with the notion that ‘green’ means ‘philanthropy’. And they treat it as such. Its ironic then, to find the mafia being the hardest-headed business people of all, exploring green energy as a particularly lucrative field for doing business.
How did they do it? The same way that you could (minus, I would suggest, some of the more hard-core tactics they use, that might be seen as violating the social-responsibility spirit of the enterprise):
- create wind-farm companies at a relatively small scale. This enables them to receive subsidies, particularly in Italy, and stay under the radar;
- build windfarms and capture the energy;
- receive the subsidies for generating renewable energy, sell the ‘renewable energy’ credits that come from emissions-free production, and use or sell the energy itself.
The Mafia has so far avoided actually producing and selling energy, but this is where your opportunity lies: less in intimidating government officials, and more in producing energy. After all, it would be useful to your business, and the credits – if not useful to you – would be useful to a someone else – quite possibly a customer. They might even be useful to the government that could usefully use proof that its subsidies were actually subsidising energy production, not crime.
Finally, you can sell your capacity to a foreign energy firm: today International Power of the UK, Italy’s Enel, Germany’s Eon and France’s EDF are the key players in the sector.
And that would provide all the proof you need in Italy (Europe now) that your energy is truly clean.
Thanks to Mallen Baker and Tony Webb for highlighting the article from the Financial Times. Bravo! or more accurately, Bravi!
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