Recently, the Italian Ministry of Environment and Energy Security has launched a new round of bidding for agrivoltaic projects.
This bidding, implemented by the Italian energy management agency GSE, will allocate €323 million (approximately $349 million) to support the development of agrivoltaic projects. These funds originate from the portion not fully allocated in the previous round of bidding, which amounted to €1.7 billion.
“The previous round of agrivoltaic bidding under Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan was undersubscribed, not due to capacity issues but cost reasons. Although the declared capacity exceeded expectations, the funds were not fully allocated, leading to this round of bidding,” said Patrizio Donati, co-founder and executive director of independent power producer Terrawatt. “This is likely due to the reduction in project input costs after the enactment of the bill, enabling more projects to benefit from this support mechanism.”
The results of the first round of bidding were announced in December last year, with 540 projects ultimately receiving 1.5 GW of agrivoltaic capacity. This round of bidding received 643 tender proposals, with a total capacity exceeding 1.7 GW. The average winning bid prices were €88.92/MWh for projects under 1 MW and €79.86/MWh for projects over 1 MW.
Italy will allocate €323 million in the second round of agrivoltaic bidding, which will remain open until June 30, 2025. The bidding funds come from Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), announced in February 2024, which provides €1.7 billion to support the development of over 1 GW of projects. In the first round of bidding, southern Italy received the majority of the capacity, with Sicily leading the way with 33 projects totaling 336 MW.
Similar to the previous round of bidding, winning projects must be put into commercial operation by the end of June 2026 at the latest. The application deadline for this round of bidding is June 30, 2025.
These two rounds of bidding will drive the growth of Italy’s photovoltaic installed capacity. In 2024, Italy added 6.8 GW of new photovoltaic capacity, reaching a decade-high, with large-scale ground-mounted power stations increasing by 163% year-on-year, becoming the main driver.
