Incentives will lead to a more than doubling of Italy’s installed solar photovoltaic capacity–from about 440MW to 900MW–by the end of 2009, according to a Reuters report of an Italian government agency study.
The Italian power management agency GSE said that some 338MW of PV capacity was installed in 2008–said to be the third-biggest annual rise in solar capacity in the world, on a par with the U.S. and behind Spain and Germany.
About 34,000 new PV installations with a capacity of 435MW had started up in the southern European country once new government incentives took effect in mid-2007, Reuters reported GSE as saying in an update of the country’s PV capacity.
Those numbers compared to about 2500 PV installations with a capacity of 22MW deployed over about two years, after the first incentive scheme was introduced in 2005.
“If the requests for incentives (which follow the installation of modules) continued at the current pace, the number of installations operating in Italy could exceed 70,000 by the end of 2009 with a total capacity of 900MW,” the GSE report said, according to Reuters.
