Sungrow contracts 140 MW of batteries under Italy’s grid capacity auctions

The Italian energy storage market is developing rapidly, with a focus on utility-scale sites, as project prices have stabilized at around €110 ($125) per kilowatt of rated power.

“The C&I [commercial and industrial energy storage] market is … the stable one because a company is always interested in installing photovoltaic and [energy] storage systems,” said Emilio Manzoni, head of PV and BESS utility at the Italian business of Chinese company Sungrow. “This [C&I] segment has then been supported by incentive schemes for agrivoltaics, energy communities, and the Industry 5.0 call,” said Manzoni, referring to the government’s EU-funded, €6.3 billion plan to transform the manufacturing industry via energy transition technology.

“Sungrow has delivered about 1.6 GW [of products] in Italy in recent years,” Manzoni told pv magazine Italia. “For us, sales are stable.”

Sungrow has already signed three contracts for a total of 140 MW of new BESS capacity that was assigned under three grid capacity market procurement auctions, and is now negotiating for another 150 MW.

The company’s annual energy storage production capacity is 73 GWh.

The Capacity Market auctions are growing in scale. The procurement round held for electricity to be delivered this year secured 174 MW of new generation and energy storage capacity. The 2026 exercise procured 140 MW of new capacity and the 2027 auction 590 MW.

Manzoni said Sungrow is the only company in the world to have performed a burning test on its energy storage systems, setting fire to a battery container.

“We have demonstrated that, thanks to our fire-fighting systems and the fire resistance of the container structures that can last up to 120 minutes, there is no fire propagation,” he said. Those tests would be consistent with the Italian fire safety guidelines which, said the company representative, “focus precisely on [fire] propagation within an entire storage facility in the event of a fire in a single container.”

Sungrow claims to perform more than 140 security checks on its energy storage systems.

“Our systems, both C&I and utility[-scale], are ‘plug-and-play’ solutions that include the electrical panel in the same container or electrical cabinet,” added Manzoni. “Not just the batteries but all the fire and cooling systems and inverters.”

From pv magazine Italia.