The Italian Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security (MASE) has launched a new agrivoltaics (agriPV) tender.
Held by Italy’s energy management agency Gestore dei Servizi Energetici (GSE), the tender will allocate €323 million (US$349 million) to fund agriPV projects. This is due to the funds – €1.7 billion – from the previous auction not being completely allocated.
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“The previous auction for AgriPV under the PNRR was undersubscribed – not by capacity, but by cost. It appears that while there were more MW presented than expected, this did not result in a full allocation of the funds, leading to this second auction.
“This is likely due to the reduction in input costs for the projects since the law was published, meaning more projects can benefit from this support mechanism,” explained Patrizio Donati, co-founder and managing director at independent power producer Terrawatt to PV Tech.
Results for the first tender were unveiled in December and ended up awarding 1.5GW of agriPV across 540 projects. In total the auction received 643 bids for a combined capacity of over 1.7GW.
The average price for the previous tender was of €88.92/MWh for projects with less than 1MW of capacity and €79.86/MWh for projects larger than 1MW.
The tenders are financed through Italy’s national recovery and resilience plan (PNRR), which was unveiled in February 2024 with funding of €1.7 billion. The funding aimed to fund over 1GW of capacity, for which the tender allocated more than that. Southern regions in Italy ended up receiving most of the capacity tendered in the first auction with Sicily awarded the most with 336MW across 33 projects.
Similar to the previous tender, awarded projects are expected to begin commercial operations no later than the end of June 2026.
Applications can be submitted until 30 June 2025. More details regarding Italy’s agriPV tender can be accessed here (in Italian).
Both tenders could give a boost to solar PV installations in the country, which saw its highest solar PV additions in over a decade. Boosted by a 163% year-on-year growth for utility-scale solar, Italy added 6.8GW of PV in 2024.
