Renewables, permit applications drop in 2025: -63% for solar

Permit applications for new renewable energy plants in Italy have plummeted in 2025. While in recent years the curve of projects going to permitting has been progressively upwards, 2025 represented a significant reversal: compared to the peak recorded in 2024, new applications stopped at a capacity on paper of 12 GW (from the 32 of 2024) for photovoltaics, a reduction of 63%, and 9 GW for wind power more than halved compared to the 19 GW of 2024.

The numbers emerge from the REgions2030 Observatory by Elemens and Public Affairs Advisors, a project created to monitor the development of renewables in the various Italian regions through continuous analyses of data from national, regional and provincial authorisation portals.

In order to assess this change of pace, a premise must be made: from 2020 to today, more than 200 GW of solar and wind projects have applied for authorisation in Italia. This number is more than four times higher than the almost 50 GW needed to reach the Pniec (National Integrated Energy and Climate Plan) targets of 131 GW installed by 2030 (as of 31 January, Terna recorded 84 GW of operational power in Italy: 44 solar and 14 wind). The pipeline was inflated by an enthusiasm linked to the abundance of sunshine in our South together with the high prices of Italian energy: a combination that led to the concentration of projects to be authorised mainly in Sicily and Puglia.

There are several reasons for the conspicuous drop in 2025, as the heads of the REgions2030 Observatory explain. According to Tommaso Barbetti, partner at Elemens, "a new market phase seems to have begun for renewables. If the past years were those of development, understood as activities aimed at obtaining authorisations, now a new phase has begun, that of grounding investments with the creation of energy portfolios, the search for certain revenues over time for projects, financing, and construction. Moreover, the development segment is considered saturated: there are too many projects and the market's attention has shifted elsewhere. A typical phenomenon of a maturing market'.

Giovanni Galgano, CEO of Public Affairs Advisors, points out that 'in the case of solar power, there are also specific reasons. At the end of 2024, regulatory changes were introduced regarding authorisations within the so-called Consolidated Text on Renewables: the management of authorisations for the majority of new projects passed from the state to the regions. These changes, which were not fully digested either by the market or by the administrations themselves, created a sort of bewilderment that resulted in a major slowdown in the presentation of new projects'.