Italy’s largest solar farm is now online, giving the country another boost in clean power as it races to add more renewable energy.
Spanish renewable energy and electricity giant Iberdrola‘s 243-megawatt (MW) Fénix solar farm in Sicily will generate enough clean electricity each year to power the equivalent of more than 140,000 homes.
Fénix is located between the municipalities of Centuripe, Paternò, and Belpasso in the provinces of Enna and Catania. It’s expected to produce nearly 400,000 megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity annually.
The project steals the crown from Italy’s previous largest solar farm, a 170 MW facility in Viterbo, in the Lazio region on Italy’s west coast.
Fénix is made up of more than 413,000 bifacial solar panels that capture sunlight from both sides to boost electricity generation. The project is connected to the grid through 26 kilometers (16 miles) of medium-voltage lines and another 9 kilometers (5.6 miles) of high-voltage transmission lines.
More than 500 people worked on the project during peak construction.
Most of the electricity the solar farm generates has already been sold through long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs) with Italian businesses. Those contracts help companies lock in more stable electricity prices while giving developers the financial certainty needed to build large renewable energy projects.
The project was financed by the European Investment Bank (EIB).
Southern Italy, and Sicily in particular, is becoming a key region for utility-scale solar thanks to its abundant sunshine and available land.
Italy now has more than 40 gigawatts (GW) of installed solar capacity and is aiming to roughly double that by 2030 as part of its national energy and climate plan. Permitting delays and grid connection bottlenecks are throwing up obstacles, but new large-scale projects are increasingly moving forward, especially in the south.
Read more: Europe and North Africa are getting their first undersea power link
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Michelle Lewis is a writer and editor on Electrek and an editor on DroneDJ, 9to5Mac, and 9to5Google. She lives in White River Junction, Vermont. She has previously worked for Fast Company, the Guardian, News Deeply, Time, and others. Message Michelle on Twitter or at michelle@9to5mac.com. Check out her personal blog.
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