BESS technology has won the bulk of new resource contracts in the capacity market (CM) auction for delivery in 2027 in Italy.
The auction took place last week (26/27 February) and awarded 38,057MW of obligations to existing resources and 594MW to new resources, alongside 4,365MW to resources located outside of Italy.
Some 95% of the new resources were ‘electrochemical storage’, transmission system operator (TSO) Terna said, which means batteries or battery energy storage systems (BESS). That implies a figure of around 564MW.
The contract is worth €47,000 (US$49,000) per MW per year for both new and existing resources (foreign ones get a different price) and the bulk of capacity was in the North region. Italy has eight electricity market (and price) regions.
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The BESS figure is a big jump on the CM auctions for 2025 and 2026 delivery years, which saw 80-90MW of BESS capacity awarded contracts in each.
The CM and a new energy storage-only auction scheme called MACSE are set to form the bedrock of the business case for grid-scale storage in Italy, something that consultancy Timera Energy’s director for power market services Steven Coppack said made it unique in Europe (Premium access). Specifically, the long-term contracted revenue of both schemes enables risk-averse investors to enter the market.
MACSE, which stands for Meccanismo di Approvvigionamento di Capacità di Stoccaggio Elettrico or ‘Electricity Storage Capacity Procurement Mechanism’, was set to have its first auctions run in H1 2025 but that has now been pushed back to the second half of the year.
The past year or two since the MACSE scheme was confirmed has seen numerous developers and operators prepare their pipelines and projects for construction, but shovels are only expected in the ground once the full rules and criteria for MACSE are confirmed later this year.
Just last week (24 February), agritech firm N2OFF acquired two 98MW/392MWh projects in development from developer Solterra.
Utility Enel is the only company actively in construction on a substantial BESS portfolio in Italy. In 2023, it started building 1.6GW of projects, mainly in Sardinia, after big capacity market wins in 2022.
The country also leads Aurora Energy Research’s ranking of the most attractive European energy storage markets, the firm said in its European Battery Markets Attractiveness Report released today (3 March)
