The development of the project is for the production of innovative, sustainable and high-performance photovoltaic modules at the 3Sun Gigafactory. It foresees a total investment of 600 million euros in order to create a 3GW factory. 118 million will come from the European Union, thanks to the agreement that was signed on April 1st by Enel Green Power and the European Commission. This was part of the first call of the European Innovation Fund for utility scale projects. Thanks to this investment, the 3Sun Gigafactory will become the largest European factory for the production for high-performance bifacial panels on a Giga Watt scale. It will increase local direct and indirect employment, with the creation of 1,000 jobs by 2024. Furthermore, these investments will act as a catalyst for the photovoltaic value chain in Europe. When the so-called 3Sun 2.0 was set up in 2018 for the production of innovative bi-facial solar panels, it received an investment of 80 million euros. About 9 million came from the European research and innovation program Horizon 2020 European Call LCE-09-2016-2017 through its “Ampere” project, while about 14 million came from Italy’s Ministry of Economic Development and Sicily’s regional government. This investment was strategically connected to the 20 million euros that were slated for Enel’s Innovation Lab in Catania, a 10-hectare site hosting labs and proving grounds where testing takes place on cutting-edge technologies for thermal and photovoltaic solar, microgrids, storage and wind power. This 100 million investment program for the 3Sun Innovation Lab provided a boost for Enel’s center of excellence in renewable energy and innovative technologies that put the Sicilian city of Catania on the world’s green energy map. The Innovation Lab’s 25 year-long history in research and innovation, is turning Catania’s metropolitan area into a technological campus and a young entrepreneurship booster that can stimulate further research and innovation in the energy sector, along the path already blazed by Enel’s Open Innovation philosophy.
