An Irish company has clinched a deal to sell wind turbines worth more than €15 million to one of Italy’s leading suppliers of electricity from green sources – opening the way to future co-operation between Ireland and Italy in the development of renewable energies. C&F Green Energy, based in Cashla, near Athenry in Co Galway, will ship the first of the 60kw turbines to Graziella Green Power during the first quarter of 2014, and the full consignment is expected to be delivered by the middle of the following year. Around 20 of the units will be installed on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia, while the remainder will be deployed in the south of Italy, according to C&F’s founder and CEO, John Flaherty. “They’ll feed into the local grid, generating approximately 11,350 megawatt-hours per year, and providing clean energy for more than 3,500 local Italian households – an impressive illustration of exactly how renewable energy should work,” he explained. In total, said Flaherty, the power generated by the turbines will lead directly to a substantial reduction of as much as 6,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year – or 2,100 TOE (tons of oil equivalent) per year. The deal was signed at a special reception at the Irish embassy in Rome hosted by Ambassador Bobby McDonagh, in association with Enterprise Ireland. C&F Green Energy – along with C&F Tooling and C&F Automotive – is part of the Irish-owned C&F Group, set up in 1989, which now employs a total workforce of 2,200 and has manufacturing plants in Ireland, Germany, China, the US, the Czech Republic and the Philippines. Its client list includes blue-chip household names such as Ingersoll Rand, IBM, EMC, Schneider Electric, VW Group, BMW Group and GM Group. C&F Green Energy manufactures small- and medium-sized wind turbines and was the first company to miniaturise megawatt wind technology – making it more affordable for smaller purchasers such as SMEs, farmers, telecom companies, community organisations and even individual homeowners. In suitable winds, the C&F machines – a range of turbines from 10kw to 250kw – have a comparatively short payback period from three years only, for example, on a 20-year machine. Since 2010, they have sold more than 1,000, primarily in the UK and Northern Ireland where feed-in tariffs took effect the same year. Graziella Green Power is a leading Italian producer of electricity from renewable sources. It operates more than 30 sites generating power from solar panels and has also diversified into geothermal energy, bio-energy and most recently wind. Iacopo Magrini, CEO of Graziella, said the C&F machine chosen by the company was a three blade, horizontal-axis turbine, which is the most stable standard in the wind-energy sector.