Transition Plan 5.0: 3SUN's 'Made in Europe' solar technology and modules at the heart of Italy's energy transition

The so-called "Transition 5. Plan 5.0" is already a reality. Included in the NRRP decree-law approved by the Council of Ministers on February 26, the Italian government's new energy transition strategy aims to incentivize, through a tax credit scheme, investments by companies in the area to carry out renovation and innovation work that produces an advantage in terms of efficiency and energy savings. This is an important opportunity for Italy to foster and accelerate the energy and digital transition, where renewable energy, and especially solar photovoltaics, will play a crucial role in the coming years.

On the subject, Transition 5.0 provides resources of 6.3 billion euros from the NRRP funds provided in the new chapter dedicated to the European Commission's RePowerEU plan (which are added to the 6.4 billion initially provided for in the budget law, bringing the total to about 13 billion), to be used in the two-year period 2024-2025.

Incentives for photovoltaic systems

In addition to tangible and intangible assets such as machinery, systems, and software, eligible investments include those on plants for the self-production of renewable energy for self-consumption. In the case of photovoltaic systems, the condition is that the solar modules installed must have been produced in the EU member states and fall within the ranking of the three levels of high efficiency contained in ENEA's "Register of Photovoltaic Technologies," published in the decree-law in December now converted into law. Not only that, installing modules of the two classes with higher cell-level efficiency will allow access to a surcharge, competing in the calculation of the tax credit for 120% and 140%, respectively.

This is therefore an important measure that, on the one hand, focuses on the quality of solar products to ensure higher levels of energy efficiency and, on the other hand, promotes European and Italian production of photovoltaic cells and modules, reopening the game on re-shoring the solar supply chain in Europe to make the national and EU photovoltaic market independent of large Asian manufacturers.

3SUN: Italian and European excellence in solar research and development

In this sense, our 3SUN Gigafactory, which will be Europe's largest solar cell and module factory, can become a symbol of European recovery in the green supply chain. Our high-performance photovoltaic modules are manufactured in Southern Italy (Sicily) and are characterized by being premium products made with our CORE-H heterojunction technology entirely developed in Catania, Italy, and therefore 100% European. Solar products that guarantee high levels of efficiency, performance, and reliability, both for building applications (M40 and M40 BOLD modules) and for use on large photovoltaic systems (B60). This is because our CORE-H technology, which combines crystalline silicon with amorphous silicon layers, maximizes the ability to extract energy from incident light while achieving efficiency levels exceeding 24%. The result is ultra-performing solar products that can make a difference compared to Chinese competitors. 

Continuous innovation is what sets us apart as a company. In the Gigafactory, an R&D team has managed to create the advanced heterojunction technology that powers our solar modules produced in our factory and makes them unique in the market. But the research work does not stop at the present: in Catania, we are already looking to the future with the development of a new technology called "Tandem," which will be applied in the coming years to 3SUN's branded modules and which combines hetero-junction with perovskite to expand part of the solar spectrum that can be converted into electricity, achieving even higher levels of cell efficiency, ranging beyond 30%. In fact, thanks to the active collaboration with CEA/INES (National Institute of Solar Energy in France) in December 2023, we were able to achieve a new record of 28.4% laboratory-certified efficiency in a 9 cm² Tandem cell.