EDP continues to focus on Italy: €220 million for 220 MW in 2025

EDP, an international energy company headquartered in Portugal, continues to focus on Italy: "This year, we have €220 million in investments in the country," explains Roberto Pasqua, country lead for Italy for the EDP Group and executive director for South & East EU at EDP Renewables (EDPR), the division that focuses on renewables (excluding hydroelectricity). "€200 million is earmarked for utility-scale plants, with 130 MW of wind projects and 70 MW of photovoltaic projects under development, and €20 million for distributed generation. And investments for 2026, for which we have another 100 MW planned, will hopefully be in line with these. In Europe, Italy is a core market for the group, along with Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, and Poland. EDP is also active in other important markets in the Americas and the Asia-Pacific region." The current operating portfolio in Italy is over 600 MW, and in 2024 we generated almost 10% of global profits here: over €120 million of EDP's overall profit of €1.4 billion, which boasts a generation portfolio of 32 GW."

The group has 60 employees in Italy and has been present since 2010 with Edpr, for the development of utility-scale plants, and Edp Energia Italia, which operates in distributed generation, offering self-consumption solutions for primarily industrial customers, with a contracted capacity of approximately 150 MW. Since 2010, Edpr has installed approximately 1 GW in Italy, investing nearly €1.3 billion in utility-scale plants. This figure also includes asset rotation: 172 MW of wind power sold to ERG in 2022 and 191 MW of wind power sold to PLT in 2024. "The sale of assets to finance new initiatives is a strategy that is part of our industrial plan, and I don't rule out the possibility of continuing to pursue it in Italy as well," Pasqua concludes.

"In the five-year period from 2020 to 2024, we were the leading international investor in Italy, adding nearly 700 MW of new renewable capacity," the manager continues. He then explains why our market remains attractive: "It has enormous potential for renewables: there's sun and wind, especially in the South, so it's a good country for this resource. It's excellent for energy prices, given that it's closely tied to gas, thus requiring the development of alternatives to fossil fuels. Finally, it's a country with a political stability that makes it attractive to an international investor. Despite the negative aspects, such as bureaucracy and regulatory changes with unclear regulatory frameworks, the positive aspects make Italy a market worth pursuing."

The company will participate in the FerX auctions for the awarding of incentive tariffs for renewable technologies, which are now opening in July. "We expect a competitive competition for solar, more challenging for wind. The mechanism is nevertheless a sound instrument, even if it currently only covers 2025, while the expectation was for the long term," Pasqua emphasizes. It will also participate in the first MACSE (forward storage market) auction, launched by Terna in September for energy storage projects: "We have a 500 MW pipeline for this technology in Italy, which, along with solar and wind, will be one of the three pillars of the new business plan we will present by the end of the year," the manager concludes. EDP recently announced a partnership with IGAT (Siad group) to develop a distributed generation photovoltaic plant integrated with a storage system.