Renewable Energy and Virtual Worlds: the recent growth of wind farm in Italy

In the last decades renewable energy had a very significant growth mainly linked to the global climatic changes and new environmental politics. Due to this fast growth, generally the maps are not updated about the real distribution of renewable energy plants. For example, at the moment the official map of Italy has not a specific symbol for the wind farms or solar powered plants, so now we can locate only the big hydroelectric dams of the Alps. But the relevance of this landscape change encourages new representation cartographic methods, generally using simple or detailed symbolism (depending on the scale) in the “easier” upgradable virtual maps. Furthermore, several examples of detailed tridimensional models about renewable energy plants are now available in the virtual worlds (usually for photovoltaic plants, the wind farms or hydroelectric dams). In this paper we analyze the recent evolution of wind power plants in Italy. We compare a series of thematic maps, regarding the wind farms distribution in the last decades, with the available and more updated Google Earth maps. Then we focus on some examples of detailed wind farms tridimensional models, useful to define their local environmental and landscape impact assessment.