Photovoltaics for the Aosta Valley is anything but a priority. The numbers say so, but not only that. There are no applications submitted or under review to build new regional plants. And the interventions by the Autonomous Region and Cva for the alpine region are focused on hydroelectric and hydrogen, a technological frontier in the renewable sector. Photovoltaics remain in the background, due to the morphological complexity of the territory and the potential conflict with agriculture.
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95% of renewables in the Aosta Valley territory is represented by hydroelectric power and in the Aosta Valley the revamping project of the Hône 2 plant by Cva – an intervention of over 150 million – is the largest investment in the sector, at this moment, in all of Italy. “We believe that photovoltaics, despite the Aosta Valley’s primacy in hydroelectric power, can offer interesting opportunities, in light of the identification, by the Region, of areas suitable for the installation of plants. Equally interesting for companies are the paths related to energy communities and the possibility of integrating plants especially on new warehouses and production spaces.”
The latest Legambiente report essentially says two things: the Region is, among Italian territories, the one furthest from the nationally imposed targets; moreover, the hydroelectric component brings to the table the variable of revamping existing plants. “The Region is the furthest from the targets set for 2030. In the last 5 years, about 35 megawatts of power have been installed in the Aosta Valley, with an average of 7 megawatts per year, compared to over 320 megawatts that should be installed by 2030. The region is just above 10% of the path,” explains the director of Legambiente Piedmont and Aosta Valley, Alice De Marco.
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On one hand, as the technicians of the autonomous Region point out, it is awaited that the Gse publishes the equivalence parameters of the producibility of geothermal and hydroelectric sources compared to the photovoltaic source, to calibrate what the real regional contribution is to achieving national targets. On the other hand, however, as the director of Legambiente points out, the Aosta Valley can do more and must accelerate on photovoltaics. Without forgetting agrivoltaics. “I give the example of what has been done in Piedmont, in Pomaretto, to overcome the forced opposition between photovoltaics and agriculture. Here they managed to recover historic vineyards on terraces and used photovoltaic panels to protect the plants from increasingly hot summers, something that could also be done in the Aosta Valley,” adds De Marco.
In the face of a lack of planning on the photovoltaic front, renewable energy communities (Cer) could represent the tool to strengthen photovoltaic production in the Aosta Valley, as emerges from a study commissioned by Cva to the Polytechnic University of Turin and carried out involving municipal administrations and 29 SMEs in the territory. The cartographic analysis made it possible to quantify the potential for installing photovoltaic plants both in terms of power and producibility. With the Polytechnic University of Milan, a tool was then developed that allows analyses to be carried out, both on a municipal scale and with respect to primary substations, based on power, production, and consumption data.
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