- Enel Green Power will start building 1.6GW of battery storage projects in Italy this quarter, with the country’s utility-scale market expected to soar in the next three years.
- Sardinia is moving away from coal as its main source of electricity generation, opening up the avenue for renewables and storage.
The renewables arm of multinational energy firm Enel said construction would begin between April and June this year. The projects are spread across the country, located in 10 of Italy’s 20 regions, but half will be on the island of Sardinia. Construction will take around 12 months, and the systems are expected to reach commercial operation date (COD) in 2024. Most are located at decommissioned or under-decommissioning thermal power plants. Sardinia is moving away from coal as its main source of electricity generation, opening up the avenue for renewables and storage.
The projects will use lithium-ion battery technology. Enel said that special attention is being paid to the end-of-life for those cells, highlighting its recent commissioning of a 4MW/1.7MWh second-life system using EV batteries on the north coast of Africa. This is due to growing renewable energy, which seeks 72% renewables by 2030 and several other factors. Changes in the past few years to permitting and the electricity balancing market have made large-scale projects more viable. At the same time, a broader familiarity with the technology amongst developers and financiers has meant more companies entering the sector.
It hasn’t revealed the BESS technology provider or system integrator for those projects but used Fluence for previous Italy projects for which it was awarded ancillary service contracts. The residential energy storage market in Italy is already robust, with the second-highest (321MWh) deployments in 2022 after Germany, according to figures from trade body SolarPower Europe. This is partially down to the country’s Super bonus 110% tax credit for home renovations which increases energy efficiency, including residential energy storage, brought in as part of Italy’s recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic.