Italy’s electricity sector is ready to mobilize up to €200 billion in additional investment over the next 10 years, with system-wide savings potentially reaching €20 billion a year once fully phased in. That’s according to the study “Electricity for a Safer and More Competitive Italy,” presented at the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio by Teha Group and Elettricità Futura.
A €200 billion plan to cut energy costs
The study identifies increased efficient domestic generation, particularly from renewable sources, as the main lever for structurally lowering electricity costs. The report also points to fully exploiting the repowering potential of existing plants as a complementary path.
The additional investment, the study notes, could bring savings to the power system of up to roughly €20 billion a year once fully operational.
The impact on Italy’s economy: GDP, output and jobs
According to Teha and Elettricità Futura’s estimates, deploying this additional capital would generate large-scale effects for the Italian economy: over €120 billion in GDP, €300 billion in production value, and up to 166,000 jobs a year.
These figures add to what the broader electricity supply chain already generates today, worth €226 billion in production value and €58 billion in added value — roughly 3% of Italy’s GDP (4.4% including indirect effects) — while supporting 570,000 jobs.
The real bottleneck: permitting
The report is blunt about the main obstacle: more than 4,000 projects, totaling around 150 GW, are still stuck in the permitting process. In Italy, average authorization times for renewable plants still exceed the 24-month EU threshold set by the RED III directive.
According to the authors, Italy’s project pipeline is already “large and mature”: the challenge isn’t generating new initiatives, but turning already-advanced projects into installed capacity that can actually be integrated into the grid.
Repowering: 21 GW more with no additional land use
One of the study’s most significant findings concerns repowering existing solar and wind plants, which could add 21 GW of capacity overall (15 GW from solar and 6 GW from wind) with no additional land use.
What it takes to get the investment moving
For the €200 billion plan to translate into real benefits, the study identifies several essential conditions: regulatory and policy stability, genuine growth in electricity demand, fast and predictable permitting processes, local community consent, and proactive collaboration among all stakeholders.
Safely integrating renewables into the system, the authors warn, also requires parallel investment in modern, resilient, digitalized grids, storage systems, low-carbon dispatchable capacity, and demand flexibility.