Italy

The central Italian province of Viterbo has 1,359 MW of solar generation capacity in the development and approvals process. The mass of projects has raised opposition from some locals and developers are in talks with government officials to discuss how concerns can be addressed.

An Italian research team has developed a device that it says can easily be integrated into a PV cell, and can boost its efficiency by converting more light particles into a high energy state before they are absorbed by the cell. The scientists claim that their innovation could offer a green‐to‐blue photon upconversion yield as high as 15%.

LevelTen claims its online platform offers small companies the chance to band together to buy green energy and connects renewable energy producers and consumers in such an effective manner it has already driven $1 billion of green energy supply in its homeland.

According to figures from Italian renewables body ANIE Rinnovabili, 18,036 storage systems coupled to clean energy power generation have been installed in the country. Most of the batteries are in Lombardy, whose administration offers rebates.

Chinese state-owned PV manufacturer Jetion Solar says it has signed a deal with Italian government-owned oil and gas major Eni to develop a slew of new solar projects across five regions in the next three years in a deal worth €2 billion.

Scientists from Russia’s NUST MISIS institute and the University of Rome have discovered a two dimensional titanium carbide can improve the performance of a halide perovskite solar cell when added in microscopic amounts across the various cell layers.

The Italian energy company has committed to paying higher returns on today’s fundraising bond if it fails to ramp up its installed renewable energy generation capacity to 55% of its overall total by the end of 2021.

The levelized cost of energy produced by large scale PV projects ranges from €24/MWh in southern Spain to €42/MWh in Finland. New research states that is already cheaper than the average spot market electricity price and that the figure for big facilities in southern Spain may fall to €14 in 2030 and €9 in 2050.

Researchers have developed a high-resolution geospatial method of assessing the solar potential of all buildings in the EU and concluded rooftop PV could provide a quarter of the bloc’s electricity needs. The scientists say grid parity for rooftop solar has been reached outside eastern member states with cheap fossil fuel electricity.

A new report from analysts at Wood Mackenzie forecasts 6.6 GWh of residential energy storage to be installed across Europe by 2024. The economics of the technology are at a tipping point, increasingly reaching grid parity in European markets. With rising electricity demand and falling battery system costs, the trend will further spread across the continent and fuel an uptick in demand.