Italy Adds 4.83 GW of Solar in First Nine Months of 2026

Italy added 4.83 gigawatts of new solar capacity in the first nine months of 2026, according to grid operator Terna’s connection data, pushing the country’s cumulative installed photovoltaic capacity to 48.35 GW by the end of September. The pace is running ahead of last year: Italia Solare’s analysis of Terna’s Gaudì database puts the January-September 2025 figure at 4.08 GW, meaning this year’s additions are up by roughly 18% even as the number of individual new systems actually fell, from 161,962 to 147,632.

Utility-scale projects now lead the market

The composition of Italy’s solar build-out has shifted. Utility-scale plants accounted for 2.24 GW of the new capacity added in the first three quarters — about 46% of the total — across just 473 installations, confirming that large, centrally dispatched solar farms rather than rooftop systems are now driving most of the country’s new capacity. Commercial and industrial installations added a further 1.70 GW across nearly 12,000 sites (35% of the total), while small residential systems up to 20 kW contributed 897 MW across 135,254 connections, or about 19% of new capacity. That mix is close to the reverse of Italy’s historical solar market, which for years was dominated by small rooftop installations incentivised under the country’s early feed-in-tariff schemes.

Battery storage is scaling alongside solar

Storage additions are keeping pace with the solar build-out. Italy connected 1.95 GWh of new battery capacity across 98,197 systems in the first nine months of 2026, split between 907 MW of nameplate power. That brings cumulative storage to 19.98 GWh and 8.34 GW across nearly 985,000 systems nationwide — of which about 12.55 GWh is paired directly with solar generation and 7.37 GWh operates as stand-alone storage, feeding or drawing from the grid independently of any single generation asset. The split underscores how much of Italy’s battery fleet is now residential-scale storage bundled with rooftop solar, rather than grid-scale systems built for wholesale arbitrage.

Corroborating the numbers

Terna’s own monthly dashboard, separately reported by Italian energy-sector outlet QualEnergia and by Teleborsa via Borsa Italiana, puts total installed solar capacity at 48.3 GW as of September 30 — in line with Italia Solare’s 48.35 GW figure — within a total renewable fleet of 88.8 GW that also includes roughly 14 GW of wind. Terna’s data shows renewable capacity grew by about 675 MW in September alone, with solar accounting for most of that increase, even as the pace of new grid-connection requests for both storage and the data-centre sector that increasingly competes with it for grid capacity continues to climb.

A market still short of its 2030 targets

At roughly 48 GW installed, Italy remains well short of the 80 GW of solar capacity its National Energy and Climate Plan envisions by 2030 — a gap that implies the country needs to sustain or exceed its current pace of additions for the rest of the decade rather than ease off it. Grid connection delays, permitting bottlenecks in several Italian regions, and competition for transmission capacity from the same data-centre buildout reflected in Terna’s connection-request data are among the constraints developers and trade groups have flagged as risks to that trajectory. The acceleration in utility-scale solar suggests financing and siting for large projects have become easier to clear even as rooftop additions slow, a pattern distinct from the policy-driven solar expansion seen in emerging markets such as Iraq’s recent move to scrap import duties on solar equipment, or from corporate-backed solar builds like Enel’s newly completed 985 MW complex in Colombia — both cases where a single policy or contract, rather than a broad market shift, is driving the capacity added.

Italy’s wider energy mix is also shifting

The solar data arrives as Italy’s broader energy debate is in motion on multiple fronts. The country’s Eni, mostly known for oil and gas, has been diversifying into low-carbon infrastructure such as its first-of-a-kind CO2 capture platform in the UK’s Liverpool Bay, while Italy’s parliament voted this year to reopen the legal door to nuclear power after banning it for nearly four decades. Solar’s rapid, utility-scale-led growth is, for now, advancing on its own track, but it is one of several simultaneous shifts in how Italy expects to generate its electricity over the next decade.

Sources

• pv magazine, “Italy deploys 4.83 GW of PV in January-September,” October 24, 2026 — capacity, segment and storage figures from Italia Solare’s analysis of Terna’s Gaudì database.
• QualEnergia, “Rinnovabili, 675 MW in più a settembre,” October 2026 — independent confirmation of Terna’s September dashboard figures for cumulative solar and renewable capacity.
• Teleborsa / Borsa Italiana, October 21, 2026 — further independent corroboration of Terna’s September capacity data.

Illustrative image. Photo: Dietmar Rabich, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons — source