Modernised PV plants contribute to the Italian grid

A team from ContourGlobal is undertaking an ambitious growth project: revamping and repowering 35 of ContourGlobal’s 71 solar PV plants in Italy.

This project is set to increase the installed capacity of the modernized plants by 43% without any additional land use, leveraging the higher power density of the new modules installed in the same areas and the Italian grid’s hosting capacity.

Paola Agrati, country manager of Italy for ContourGlobal, shares some of the project’s recent advancements, highlighting the company’s commitment to enhancing renewable power through new developments and upgrades of existing plants.

What is the project about?

The upgrade of our PV plants will boost ContourGlobal’s total solar PV capacity in Italy to 113MW, significantly enhancing our contribution to the country's renewable energy landscape.

Revamping means installing more efficient modules, and inverters and moving from a fixed panel to a solar tracking technology that allows, at parity of installed capacity, to produce more electricity.

In this case, the original installed capacity of the 35 plants (42.3MWp) continues to benefit from the Feed-in-tariff which we will capture with higher volumes of power generated. However, the space which is freed up from more efficient panels in the PV sites is then used to build new installed capacity.

This is what we call Repowering and will allow us to install up to 17.9MWp of additional merchant capacity on spare land made available after the revamping activities.

How is the construction work progressing?

Construction is progressing in line with the forecast schedule, despite a slight delay in starting the works compared to our initial plans. The PV modules, inverters and structures for the first batch were all delivered on time and the second batch will arrive between September and November.

By the beginning of September, we had 19 PV plants fully re-energized and 2 others partially for a total of approximately 25MWp. The second phase of the revamping project will take place after the summer in Q3 and Q4 2024 with some of the repowering activities to be completed in 2025, pending some upgrades and work on the grid to be performed by the TSO/DNO.

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Can you give us an idea of the complexity of the works, which are taking place across different regions in Italy?

At the peak of the project, we had a total of 100 workers involved.. Currently, we have five general contractors working simultaneously in 20 PV plants and, most importantly, we are in line with our target of zero incidents.

We adopted a “cluster” approach to our construction activities to be able to conduct work in parallel on so many sites.

Before the start of construction, a significant amount of preparatory work was needed by the operations, legal and finance teams starting from the beginning of the year. The teams negotiated in parallel a number of land lease extensions, filed and obtained the relevant authorizations to start the work, concluded several contracts to procure the supply of modules, inverters and trackers from EU and non EU manufacturers and selected, after a thorough competitive process, several general contractors to perform the works in line with our standards and values.

In parallel, the team handled the negotiation and execution of innovative financing that was put in place to reduce our equity exposure in the investment. Many meetings and calls were held with lenders and advisors leading to several revisions of complex documentation.

This project is accretive to our business and in line with our path to growth, value that was recognized by our minority shareholder in the assets, EIP, by the lenders and the various stakeholders involved.

What are the sustainability improvements of the project and how is the project controbuting to Italy’s energy transition?

The project features numerous relevant improvements in the sustainability dimensions. The discarded modules, for example, are subject to end-of-life processing that allows to recover 97% of the materials which includes copper, silver, aluminium, glass and crystalline silicon.

The old ground-mounted steel structures being replaced by new single-axis trackers, as well as the old inverters being upgraded, are also subject to similar processes highlighting the importance of circular approaches. Finally, considering the newly installed capacity of the 71 PV plants at the end of the project, ContourGlobal will be providing enough solar power to supply more than 70 thousand Italian homes over an entire year.