Power firms RWE and BNZ have both announced construction on large-scale BESS projects in Italy, all-in-all totalling nearly 500MWh of capacity.
The double-header of project news comes ahead of Italy’s second MACSE auction, scheduled for later this month, following the first in September 2025.
The auction and its 15 years of guaranteed revenues was effectively the starting gun on Italy’s grid-scale energy storage market and the year since has seen gigawatt-hours of projects enter construction.
MACSE and Italy will be big talking points at the second Battery Asset Management Summit Europe in Rome a few weeks later, running on 2-3 December.
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RWE starts building first Italian BESS
Germany-headquartered power generation firm and utility RWE has launched construction on its 62.5MW/262.5MWh capacity Ragusa battery energy storage system (BESS) project in Sicily, Italy.
Commissioning is scheduled for the end of 2027, it said in its announcement today (10 November). It will connect to the grid at the 150kV-level.
The company has been active in Italy’s solar and wind market for many years, but this is its first BESS project in Italy. It was not one of the handful of MACSE-winning projects.
It appears to be the same project that solar PV firm Longi said it would supply 300MWh of its BESS for a few months ago, one of Longi’s first major deals in Europe since launching a BESS division in 2025.
Although RWE didn’t name the supplier in its announcement, it said the project would comprise 42 lithium-ion battery units, implying they are 6.25MWh each (to reach 262.5MWh, not taking into account the 300MWh overbuild). That matches Longi’s product.
Alongside its core legacy fossil fuel generation business, RWE is active in renewables and BESS globally: can see all our coverage of its storage activity here.
BNZ hybridising Italy solar PV projects
In related news, independent power producer (IPP) BNZ has started building two BESS projects in Italy totalling 216MWh of capacity.
The two BESS are 27MW/108MWh each and are being added to its operational Rinaldone (45MWp) and Camposcala (53MWp) solar PV plants in the Lazio region. BNZ said this will allow it to store energy during peak production and discharge it to the grid during higher demand periods.
Construction is being carried out by engineering and infrastructure companies Grupotec and Grupo Elecnor and commissioning is planned before the end of the year, implying construction is well underway already.
BNZ announced an order from inverter and BESS firm Sungrow for the two BESS projects in July, so construction may have begun then. That came a few months after BNZ announced plans to hybridise its solar PV portfolio in Spain, Italy and Portugal. The firm is owned by investor Nuveen Infrastructure.
