New RES plants with a capacity of 3.37 GW to be installed in 2022

Roberto Cingolani, the Italian Minister of Ecological Transition, recently announced to Parliament that his Department has already received connection applications from RES plants totaling 5.1 GW.

Later on, this figure was confirmed by Terna’s data, shared online by the Department, showing a projection of the power from renewable sources to be installed in our country.

According to Terna’s data, RES plants in operation in 2021 achieved a total capacity of 1.36 GW, an estimate that is bound to triple to 5.1 GW in 2022.

As of April 2022, plants for 0.64 MW were already completed and activated and another 0.68 GW will soon be connected to the HP grid, having won the first auctions with GSE, the National Grid Operator this year.

Most of the expected power increase is from solar sources, with a set of new plants totaling 3.37 GW in 2022. Of these, 2.8 GW are connected to the grid, with medium and small plants up to 1 MW that benefit from permit simplifications.

Based on data on new authorized plants, we known that 2.1 GW of new RES plants will come on line in 2023 and 1.1 GW in 2024 totaling more than 8 GW authorized power since the government has accelerated the renewable energy process. 

A particularly interesting figure is the total installed capacity in 2022, which will be 2.5 times the total connected power in the previous two years (2020 and 2021).

This especially intense acceleration was caused by:

• the speeding up of the EIA permitting process, thanks to the creation of the EIA Fast Track, which has reviewed as many as 122 projects since 18 January 22 (the date of its establishment), approving 103 projects and rejecting 17;
• the release of projects blocked by the Landscape Authorization Superintendence thanks to the Italian Government's substitution powers, and
• the speeding up of implementation processes for plants that do not go through the GSE auction procedure and therefore do not benefit from public subsidies, but only follow the free market path with different authorization processes or simplifications (as in the self-consumption case).

Terna’s estimates consider a yield of:

• 5.5 TWh in 1500 hours per year from solar installations;
• 2.2 TWh in 2000 hours from wind plants;
• 1.9 TWh in 6500 hours from geothermal and biogas plants,

​for RES plants to be connected in 2022. These will be increased by about 5.3 TWh produced in the next 24 months based on authorized RES projects, saving more than 3 billion cubic meters of gas. 

Obviously, all these estimates refer to data collected in the early months of 2022, and another boost to RES growth in Italy may be expected from further process simplification from the Italian Government and the achievement of a steady state.

Lastly, Terna announced that projects for about 24 GW on the HV-VHV grid are in an advanced stage of development, including 12.4 GW from solar plants and 10.7 GW from wind power plants. Once they have obtained the related authorization, they will add to the number of projects become operational in the coming years.