Shopping centres could be worth 3.5% of Italian photovoltaics

Shopping centres as a driver for the country's energy transition. With the potential capacity to generate up to 1.1 GW of renewable power, or 3.5% of the current installed photovoltaic power, equal to the contribution of the entire region of Sardinia. This - together with the attractiveness game that has seen malls transform over the years into places for meeting and social interaction, in addition to shopping - is one of the two great challenges for shopping centres, well described and argued at the presentation event of the strategic study The contribution of Shopping Centres to the competitiveness and energy transition of the country, carried out by The European House - Ambrosetti in collaboration with CNCC, the association that represents the entire shopping centre industry in Italy, held in the new Parliamentary Groups Hall in Rome.

"The sector has great potential to reduce its consumption and also own capital to invest in energy saving," commented Roberto Zoia, president of the National Council of Shopping Centres. "Look at today's shopping centres: next to the structure itself you will see street furniture, roads, green and play areas. Tomorrow they could also become real renewable energy facilities. However, we need a regulatory framework that will help us make this transformation - especially by exceeding the 1 MW limit for plants that can benefit from the incentive tariff provided by the new regulations on collective self-consumption and renewable communities (a shopping centre consumes an average of 4.5, ed.) - to ensure the economic sustainability of the investment".

Some help to the system has already arrived from the government with the equating of shopping centres to condominiums, to allow the sector to fall within the parameters of collective self-consumption, however, "the incentivisation of plants with the 1 MW limit is a constraint of the NRP, so it must remain, precisely because it was created with the aim of developing family, domestic or SME self-consumption," commented the Minister for the Environment and Energy Security, Gilberto Pichetto Fratin, on the sidelines of his speech at the conference. 'Reasoning on self-consumption with higher limits can be done, and the government will come up with ad hoc measures, but in this case it cannot be an intervention with the support of European funds'.

As the GSE also noted, a key to multiplying aid could be to adhere to the facilities provided by the new thermal account decree, which is currently being finalised. In fact, the public consultation launched by Mase for the Conto termico 3.0, which closed on 10 May last, goes precisely in the direction of expanding the incentives towards energy efficiency measures and the production of thermal energy from renewable sources for buildings in the private tertiary sector, but also of public and private entities that are part of collective self-consumption configurations or renewable energy communities.

There are more than 1200 shopping centres in Italy. The extended supply chain - which includes shopping centres and indoor retailers - is worth 57.3 billion euro (+11.3% over 2021), higher than important economic sectors such as the food industry (24.8 billion) and textiles and clothing (23.6 billion). Important numbers with which The European House of Ambrosetti has carried out the first mapping of the sector, which sees 730 thousand employees, 4 billion euro of investments made and 130 billion euro of turnover. "Considering also the manufacturing sector and the service sector activated upstream and downstream by this supply chain, shopping centres in 2022 generated 226.6 billion euro of added value in Italy, equal to 12% of the country's GDP," commented Valerio De Molli, Managing Partner and CEO of The European House - Ambrosetti.