Opinion piece questions ownership behind Portugal's solar boom

In an opinion piece, planner Nuno Mamede Santos argues that renewable energy's benefits depend on ownership and scale, not just the technology itself. He contrasts community-owned models in Germany, Denmark and Portugal's Coopérnico cooperative with Portugal's large industrial solar parks, citing the Santiago do Cacém plant, Europe's largest photovoltaic facility, built over more than 1,200 hectares of cleared montado. He argues such megaprojects replicate extractive, centralised patterns similar to fossil fuels, with profits flowing to distant shareholders while local communities bear the land and ecological impacts without cheaper electricity or decision-making power.