At the webinar organised by CNR and GreenHill Advisory “Investing in the Green Deal: Investment Funds and Opportunities in Sustainable Economy”, EOS IM describes the developments and opportunities in the industry of renewable energies.
London, 30/11/2020 – The photovoltaic industry has gone through significant changes, mostly concentrated in the last 5 years, going through different phases, from incentives to stabilization; from the remodelling of the Conto energia program (cd “Feed-in Tariff”) to yield compression; to the current outburst given by technology innovation, that today makes the industry even more sustainable compared to traditional sources even in the absence of public incentives (“grid parity”). A goal that creates the need to reduce the pollutant missions through a greater diffusion of renewables, in the face of national energy goals that ask to triplicate the speed of installation of new capacity by 2030 compared to what was registered in the past two years.
“It is then required for the industry to evolve to consolidate change and contribute to the achievement of national and European goals of green energy”, stated Giuseppe La Loggia, Head of Energy Infrastructures at EOS IM Group, in front of the virtual audience of the Forum “Investing in the Green Deal: Investment funds and opportunities of Sustainable Economy”, organised today from CNR, National Counsel of Research and GreenHill Advisory. The current challenge, in other words, is to grant investors in real economy opportunities to take advantage of the potential of renewable energies in the absence of public incentives.
“To us, the new opportunities for growth are greenfield projects operated in grid-parity, thanks to the substantial technology improvement achieved” continues La Loggia.
Technological progress has reduced costs by 30% in the last five years
According to an EOS IM analysis on International Technology Roadmap for Photovoltaic e LONGi data, investing in renewable energy from photovoltaic has a cost advantage determined by technological progress for which, in the last 5 years alone, the LCOE (cost) was reduced by almost 30% from 2015 to 2019. “In the last 5 years have been introduced on wide scale technologies like mono-crystalline cells, “passivation” (‘PERC’) and the double-sided rendering of the photovoltaic panel. Technological progress led to an important development revival of the industry, allowing to achieve driving conditions and financial independence of solar plants without the need of public incentives”, explains La Loggia. “In 30 years, solar panels’ degradation, thanks to the change in technology, has reduced of 14 percentage points, allowing a substantial mitigation of the regulatory risk, with a contextual increase of the annual production and of the project’s service life, an increased production of guaranteed energy, and longer-lasting. Last but not least, today we have a lower environmental impact related to decommissioning, in addition to a reduction of occupied areas”.
“Additional benefits related to progressive technology consolidation are related to technologies of energy storage in daily and seasonal production peaks that do not always match usage, so all our investments will take this into consideration” added La Loggia.
In the end was highlighted the positive impact, relevant when it comes to the real economy of the area involved in the development of new energy-generating plants given the concrete potential in terms of employment and enhancement of the area.