Environmental and Economic Assessment of the Italian Energy Transition Scenarios

Abstract

The aim of this work is to assess the environmental and economic impact of the Energy Transition of the Italian Electrical Sector, as planned by the PNIEC (Integrated National Energy and Climate Plan), published in December 2019, and by the scenarios, developed by Terna and Snam, updated to reach the Fit-for-55 objectives. The analysis of the historical trends related to RES (Renewable Energy Sources) capacity increase, allows comparing the historical effort with the one expected to reach the 2030 goals. In particular wind off-shore production is expected to have a larger impact than envisaged before. On the technical side, some scenarios assumptions are going to be revised to more realistic values. The technological and economic efforts, besides an estimation of the expected global environmental benefit, are assessed taking into account: i) the revised RES capacity increase, ii) the grid infrastructure enhancement, and iii) the envisaged installation of new storage and electrolyzer capacity. With flexibility items, ii) and iii), requiring a similar level of capital cost as the new RES capacity. The reduction in natural gas consumption in the different scenarios is expected to reduce both the Green House Gas emissions and the operating cost with a large impact on the average efficiency of the natural gas-fed power plants.