The country installed 35 MW more solar in the first three months of the year than it did in the same period a year earlier. Its cumulative capacity surpassed 22.1 GW by the end of March.
Italy installed around 152 MW of solar power in the first three months of 2021, according to provisional numbers released by the Italian renewable energy association, ANIE Rinnovabili, and data provided by grid operator Terna.
The performance is up from 115 MW in the same period last year, and 105 MW in the first quarter of 2018. March was the month with the highest growth this year, at 55.3 MW, followed by February and January, with 54.38 MW and 42.1 MW, respectively.
If this growth trend would be confirmed over the rest of the year, Italy may see the largest amount of newly installed PV capacity over the past decade and, eventually, return to a gigawatt market dimension. Much will depend, however, on how many large scale PV projects will succeed in reaching completion. In 2020, the country added 625 MW of solar and in 2019, it deployed 737 MW.
According to the latest statistics, PV projects that do not exceed 1 MW in size represent almost all of the newly deployed capacity, at 145.4 MW. Solar parks over 1 MW only accounted for 6.6 MW of the total. The increasing success of rooftop PV is currently being ensured by the 110% fiscal break for rooftop PV linked to building renovations. The so-called “super-bonus” for building renovation projects, which was introduced in May 2020 to help revive the country’s economy from the Covid-19 crisis, was recently extended through 2022.
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Residential PV systems up to 20 kW in size still account for the largest share, with around 69.2 MW of capacity. PV systems ranging from 20 kW to 100 kW account for 32.3 MW of the quarterly total. Meanwhile, installations of commercial and industrial PV systems ranging from 100 kW to 1 MW reached 43.7 MW in the first three months of the year.
The parts of the country with the highest development volumes are the Lombardy region, which brought 27.9 MW of new solar online, and the northern region of Veneto, with 22.6 MW. Emilia-Romagna and Sicily finished the quarter with 22.3 MW and 19.7 MW, respectively.
The provisional figures indicate that Italy exceeded 22.1 GW of solar capacity at the end of March. The nation’s National Integrated Plan for Climate and Energy aims for 50 GW of solar by 2030.
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Source: pv magazine
