Italy

Enel plans to invest around €600 million in the expansion of its module manufacturing facility in southern Italy. The European Commission will contribute around €118 million to the total sum.

The Italian government hopes to deploy 375MW of PV capacity via a new rebate scheme. The funds will be provided through the post-Covid recovery plan.

Manufactured with wafers provided by Chinese PV producer Longi, the industrial-sized cells are able to provide a fill factor of 82.05%.

The agrivoltaic facility may have a capacity of 1 to 3 MW and will have to be designed to comply with landscape requirements and the agricultural practices of NeoruraleHub, which applies a blue economy model to agriculture.

A unit of Enel plans to deploy 5MW/10MWh of second-life batteries at Rome-Fiumicino International Airport, where a 30MW solar park is now under development. The modular storage system will include different second-life lithium-ion batteries, mainly based on nickel, manganese and cobalt chemistry, with usable storage capacity ranging from 10kWh to 25kWh.

The Italian government has decided to unlock 1.4GW of new renewable energy projects since the end of 2021.

A document compiled by three Italian renewables associations identifies with extreme precision the area that is allowed to be used for power generation in the two most common agrivoltaics configurations — solar arrays with elevated solar modules and PV systems deployed between crop rows.

The Chinese-Canadian company has secured the signature of Swiss energy business Axpo as offtaker for around 109GWh of solar electricity over a decade, with the clean power to be produced at Canadian Solar projects in Lazio and Sicily.

The country’s cumulative PV capacity reached 22.56GW at the end of December.

The London-based analyst has published a series of clean tech predictions for the year which also highlighted the rising proportion of sub-5MW solar projects in the global market, and cheaper clean energy financing costs even as panel prices continue to rise.