The moratorium law that blocked renewable energy plants in Sardinia for 18 months has been repealed and deemed unconstitutional. But it continues to produce effects. Negative ones, however: the risk is that the Region will be overwhelmed by requests for compensation in the millions presented by companies that had presented projects for wind and photovoltaic energy, blocked by virtue of that law.
The danger emerges from a ruling by the TAR that accepted the appeal of Sassari Wind Srl, a company that intended to build a six-blade plant in Campanedda, in the Sassari area. In September 2024, the Department of the Environment had suspended Paur's proceedings, recalling the moratorium.
In December, the law on suitable areas was approved. And a few weeks ago, the moratorium, even if passed, was declared unconstitutional because, for the Constitutional Court, it could not stop – or try to do so, given the result – all the procedures in progress, invading the field of legislation on energy, where state regulations are considered to prevail .
This is also why the Region's lawyers had tried to have the TAR declare the "cessation of the subject matter of the dispute": since the law is no longer in force, they argued, the problem is over. But the administrative judges accepted the company's lawyers' thesis: according to the TAR, it was right to reach a ruling because "it is sufficient for the party to declare that it has an interest in it for compensation purposes (...) since it is not necessary to specify the prerequisites for any compensation claim, nor to have proposed it in the same appeal proceeding or to deliberate, in a prognostic manner, its possible validity". Therefore: the appellants have the right, if they are right, to have a verdict on which to base any compensation claims. To understand: beyond the failure to build the systems, which causes possible compensable damage, the Region could be asked to pay for the costs of designing and presenting the claim. Which in some cases amount to hundreds of thousands of euros. The activation of a few proceedings is enough and the sums would increase exponentially. And the Region would be called upon to pay.
In this specific case, the TAR annulled the provisions that blocked the Sassari Wind project. And they expressed themselves in a similar way in the case of the Sardegna Green agrivoltaic plant, stopped by the Municipality of Sassari on the basis of the same moratorium.
Two verdicts, perhaps the first of a long series, that open the doors to potentially astronomical compensation requests. Without prejudice to further appeals to the Council of State by the Region.
