Solar & Storage Live Italia in Verona: Bigger crowds, more BESS / Industry News / By admin The second edition of Terrapinn’s show hints where Italy’s solar market is heading next. Walking into Solar & Storage Live Italia last week, you’d get the sense it was no side event. Especially with this year being much bigger than before. Terrapinn confirmed the attendance went from about 5,000 last year to roughly 6,000 on day one. Exhibitors grew even faster: 116 companies were on the floor, 20 of them startups. A jump of about 71% in 2025. The direction is hard to miss. Installers: the crowd to watch About 40% of attendees were installers, most of them from the Northeast. Tradeshows stick around only if the people actually putting systems on roofs find it worth their time, and that’s certainly happening. Batteries dominate the conversation Most of the sessions circled back to storage, and specifically to the two national schemes paying for it: the MACSE auction and the Capacity Market. The first MACSE auction handed out about 10 GWh of storage. Winning bids landed below the auction ceiling, which the group reads as a sign batteries have become cheap enough to compete on price. Italy’s installed storage passed 18 GWh in the first quarter of 2026. And most of the new growth is coming from big utility-scale projects. Residentials slowing down Residential is the soft spot. Italia Solare’s mid-year numbers show residential solar connections dropping from 725 MW to 556 MW in the first half of 2026, compared with a year earlier. Commercial and utility projects fill the gap. Even so, several speakers pushed back on the idea that home batteries are fading. An installer-side executive noted most new home solar systems will come with storage from day one. Another pointed out that cheaper lithium alone won’t decide what a home battery costs, since design and how the unit looks are becoming part of the sale. The bigger picture Italy is strong on solar. Terrapinn’s market overview puts installed capacity at about 43.5 GW by the end of 2025, up roughly 17% on the year before. Storage was the weaker link. Italy added about 5 GWh of batteries last year, down 18%, according to SolarPower Europe. This may come from a “wait and see” period while buyers wait for the new national schemes to start working. So it’ll be worth seeing whether the coming capacity auctions turn into actual built projects.There’s no shortage of interesting directions to take. A presenter made the case for sodium batteries, arguing they beat lithium on cycle life. Sodium isn’t a big player in the nation yet but it has a serious slot on the agenda, which tells you some are looking past lithium. Visitors at the show stood positive. And the message from most stands was pretty simple: solar without storage is getting harder to imagine.
