Solar plants are built to run for 30 years or more, yet the choices that shape those decades are often made in a matter of weeks, under pressure to hit pipeline targets. A panel organized by the Solar+ Leaders ecosystem at Solar & Storage Live Italia asked what it takes to lead with that long horizon in mind, arguing that resilience and energy security depend as much on the people who lead the sector as on the capacity they deploy.
A recurring theme was that much of a solar plant’s fate is sealed at the start. Letizia Petracci, Vice President Technical at Starlight Energy, part of the NextEnergy Group, pointed to Italy’s connection queue: requests for renewables exceed 300 GW, roughly four times the new capacity foreseen in the national plan to 2030. Since September, grid access goes to whoever obtains authorization first, not whoever applies first, which raises the stakes on choosing which projects to pursue.
Why does that choice weigh so heavily? Because, as Petracci explained, the developer is the first link in the chain: its decisions are inherited by those who build, finance and operate a plant for 30 years, and by the community that hosts it. In its first weeks, a project is cheap and still easy to stop; the further it advances, the harder it becomes to say no, not for technical reasons, but because pipeline targets loom and the time already invested feels wasted. The new rules sharpen the dilemma: developers must now move fast and carry projects all the way to authorization with no certainty of a connection.
“Leadership is measured above all in a little-celebrated skill: knowing how to decide early, and honestly, what not to do,” Petracci said. Speed built on competence and organization pays off, she argued; haste simply passes the cost of shortcuts to whoever comes next.
David Moser, managing director Italy at Becquerel Institute, spent 13 years leading a research group at Eurac in Bolzano studying how PV plants age and degrade. He has repeatedly seen plants underperform after eight or ten years because of choices made by people who have since moved on. “Whoever takes shortcuts isn’t getting ahead: they are offloading a cost onto someone else in the value chain, and sooner or later that cost comes back,” he said. Now developing AI tools for PV, Moser warned that fast answers can become a shortcut to not thinking, and that tools must show what they are based on and where they are uncertain, so that a person can still take responsibility for the decision. Now more than ever we need to develop and apply critical thinking.
Holistic thinking, connected teams
Domenico Biasi, government and regulatory affairs at Sonnedix, framed renewable plants as long-term assets that stay in a territory for decades. An IPP, he said, must be recognized not only as able to build, but as a serious investor that keeps its commitments, which means weighing financial, social, environmental and regulatory risks together. “Responsible leadership does not give up on performance; it makes it sustainable,” Biasi said, calling for cross-functional teams involved from day one and T-shaped professionals who combine deep expertise with the ability to talk across disciplines.
For Maria Sabella, founder and CEO of Enlight Energy Services, which supports investors across the lifecycle of Italian utility-scale PV, continuity is the overlooked risk. Plants often change hands, so service providers must preserve their operational memory. “Our leadership is key to maximizing team retention and encouraging continuous training, so that knowledge is not concentrated but shared and preserved,” she said. Sabella also stressed long-term partnerships and genuine value co-creation with key suppliers, and the growing need to connect plant owners with energy consumers whose core business lies elsewhere.
Angelica Almi, head of legal at ESCo Kataclima and co-founder of Italia Rinnovabile, a benefit cooperative developing renewable energy communities, warned against mistaking compliance for impact. “One of the most dangerous temptations is confusing a project that ‘works’ with a project that ‘will work’,” she said. A community can meet every deadline and secure its incentives, yet fail if governance is unclear or citizens don’t understand how benefits are shared. Almi also urged organizations to give young professionals responsibility before they have 20 years of experience – otherwise, she noted, companies end up searching for talent someone else has trained.
Moderating the panel, Gulnara Abdullina, Advisory Board Member at Circular Synergies, the organisation behind Solar+ Leaders, commented: “I opened by asking whether our leadership models are evolving as fast as the energy systems we’re building. Our panellists, Maria, Letizia, Domenico, Angelica and David, shared their very diverse experiences and identified the typical risks associated with weak leadership. None of these risks was capacity or technical problems. They are judgment calls, made by usually one person, usually early, before there’s any data to back the decision up. That’s what “intelligence in leadership” actually means in this sector: not having the answers, but building an inclusive organisation that lets someone make the call and be backed for making it.”
The people-centred theme carried into an additional session organised by Women in Solar+ Europe (WiSEu) where speakers argued that teams that flag a weak project early and share knowledge rather than hoard it, depend on something more basic: environments where everyone feels safe to speak, and is expected to.
Maribel Otaño, Country Manager Italy at Solis: “I witnessed something fundamental when it comes to psychological safety: creating spaces where people feel safe to share their opinions is not a luxury. It’s essential. At Solis, my team and I work every day to foster an environment where all voices are truly heard. For me, it’s critical that the decisions we make are based on active listening, without judgment, without dismissal, always with respect. When that happens, people speak up early. They challenge ideas. They contribute what they really think. And the quality of what we build improves. This responsibility is not just mine as a leader. It belongs to everyone in the organization. Each person decides, every day, whether to create that safety and protect it. That takes commitment from leadership and courage from everyone else, and it’s worth the investment.”
Elena Maspoli, founder of Greenspire, has followed renewables from the finance side as they grew from a pioneering niche into a sector employing nearly 2 million people in the EU. As the industry matures, she noted, skills become more specialised and organisations more complex, requiring constant dialogue between project management, legal, external relations and structured finance. Inclusive organisations are also a retention tool, as candidates increasingly weigh work-life balance alongside role and pay.
Maspoli described psychological safety as something built through small “nudges”, borrowing Nobel laureate Richard Thaler’s term. A manager who asks the team for ideas before imposing a decision, and explains why ideas are set aside, teaches people to form and share opinions. The main obstacle, she said, is often time, in organisations focused on getting results as fast as possible. “In the long run, what creates a stable organisation is getting from A to B with the contribution of everyone involved,” Maspoli said. For those without formal authority, her advice was to occupy spaces rather than wait for them: a silence or hesitation in a meeting can be the moment to put forward a solution.
Ercilia Estrada, project manager oversight at Gruppo Undo, an integrated industrial operator and IPP with around 150 MW installed, pointed to trust and mutual respect, recognition of everyone’s contribution and a culture of candid, constructive feedback. But she stressed that safety brings responsibility. “When everyone knows they can speak up, it becomes essential to also take responsibility for putting one’s skills at the service of the organisation,” Estrada said, calling for a solution-oriented mindset rather than simply describing problems. She applied the same logic to battery storage: developing BESS in Italy involves institutions and private operators alike, and will depend on leadership that strengthens coordinated collaboration among all of them every day.
Giulia Muia, an independent advisor who connects foreign investors and IPPs with developers, EPC contractors and landowners, and who helps energy-intensive clients through the energy transition, brought the view of someone who has often been both the youngest and the only foreigner in the room, after a decade in Germany working in M&A, strategy consulting, investment funds and IPPs. A classicist by training, she started from etymology: security comes from the Latin sine cura, “without worry”, meaning, at work, without fear of being judged too harshly for speaking up or making a mistake. That matters most when you are young. She recalled how, as a junior strategy consultant, the head of her company would sit down with her, open his notebook and ask how things could improve, writing down her answers. “He probably knew it all already, but in that moment I felt I could tip the scales,” she said. “That confidence taught me to take space, and later to give it.”
Being a foreigner, she added, raises the bar further. In meetings in Germany, she had the ideas but had to express them in a language learned at 20. “Speaking on the street is one thing; speaking in a meeting is another. I needed more time to say the same things.” That kind of space rarely appears on its own; it has to be deliberately created. For Muia, everyone has to be heard: the young, women, foreigners, and those who lack the expected title or credentials. Their input should then be integrated and judged on its merits. Her example came from the field: engineers and geologists can complete every study, yet it is the local farmer who warns that the land floods. “The information that changes a project often comes from the source you least expect,” Muia said. Just as no one would build energy security on a single source, she argued, diversification is what makes teams resilient. But that space cannot depend on the courage of the youngest or the most exposed: empowerment has to come top-down, not bottom-up. With the sector expanding fast, now is the time to train and integrate new talent: “We have a rare chance to build an industry’s culture as it is born, instead of having to correct it later.”
Across both sessions, the common thread was clear: Italy’s energy security will depend not on the megawatts requested, but on the megawatts actually built, connected and operated well for decades, and on leaders, with or without a formal title, who create the conditions for every voice to shape the choices that get them there.
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