The European Commission has approved Agrivoltaico’s tender, the second under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, worth one billion euros. The first one paid 500 million to 7,000 enterprises.
Agrisolare is one of the new frontiers of renewable energy and allows the installation of solar panels with nearly no consumption of soil, because they coexist with cultivated fields, even if in the case of the current tender we mean primarily the roofs of agricultural buildings. Thus, the current tender is apt to finance the installation of solar panels on buildings, rather than seek their coexistence with crops.
“The European Commission has given the green light to the new decree of the Agrisolare tender. This measure of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, which has a fund of one billion euros, provides for non-repayable loans of up to 80% for the construction of photovoltaic systems. A percentage that, in some cases, is doubled compared to the previous provision,” explained Francesco Lollobrigida, Minister of Agriculture, Food Sovereignty and Forests. “The decree establishes the new aid scheme for interventions on buildings for productive use in the agricultural, zootechnical, and agro-industrial sectors. The goal is to encourage the development of renewable energies and the reduction of production costs for companies. Energy procurement costs, in fact, on average represent over 20% of the variable costs borne by companies. The possibility of self-producing energy from renewable sources using one’s own buildings, and therefore without any soil consumption, is not only a great step towards the sustainability of the sector but also an opportunity to lower production costs and, at the same time, grow, in terms of competitiveness of our nation.”