Italian Battery Deal Puts Portugal’s Greenvolt at Europe’s Storage Forefront

Europe's race to store renewable electricity is accelerating, and a Portuguese-born company has elbowed its way to the front. Greenvolt’s latest victory in southern Italy may feel distant from Lisbon’s rooftops, yet it says a great deal about how Iberian households will keep their lights on when the wind dies down and the sun sets.

Why this matters for Portugal’s energy bills

Portugal wants clean power without the price spikes that have plagued the Iberian market in recent winters. For that to happen, somebody must tame the intermittency of wind farms in Viana do Castelo and solar parks across the Alentejo. Greenvolt’s rise is part of that answer. By clinching a 15-year contract for 499 MWh of battery capacity under Italy’s new MACSE scheme, the company has demonstrated that long-duration storage can be financed at scale and at prices well below early forecasts. Analysts in Porto argue that the bid offers a “benchmark” when Portugal’s own grid operator, REN, finalises rules for domestic capacity tenders next year. In other words, the economics proven in Calabria could soon dictate how much Portuguese consumers pay for kilowatt-hours after sunset.

Inside the Italian breakthrough

The winning project near Crotone blends 75 MW of power with 600 MWh of usable energy, letting it discharge at full tilt for eight straight hours—far longer than the four-hour lithium systems common in Spain or Germany. That duration is vital for a peninsula whose solar production peaks at lunchtime but whose air conditioners hum deep into the evening. Greenvolt’s local team secured the contract in a field where demand outstripped supply by more than four to one, beating bids from giants such as Enel and Eni. Crucially, the tariff landed well below the €37,000/MWh-year ceiling, settling near €12,146/MWh-year for the South & Calabria zone. Italian regulators hailed the oversubscription as proof that battery investors no longer need lavish subsidies to make projects bankable.

Decoding MACSE: the mechanism everyone now watches

MACSE—short for Meccanismo di Acquisizione di Capacità di Stoccaggio di Elettricità—is Terna’s answer to the grid-stability puzzle. Participants post hefty guarantees, promise to hand 80 % of trading profits back to the system operator, and receive a fixed annual premium that rises with discharge duration. The first auction awarded 10 GWh in total and committed the winners to go live by 2028. Two additional rounds, scheduled for 2029 and 2030, should lift Italy’s storage fleet to 50 GWh, closing in on Rome’s target of 72 GWh by decade-end. Brussels energy officials privately call the scheme “a dress rehearsal” for similar capacity markets across the bloc, including one the Portuguese Environment Ministry is drafting for consultation early next year.

A continental playbook: Poland, Portugal, and beyond

Italy is only one tile in Greenvolt’s expanding mosaic. Work is underway on two Polish plants—Turośń Kościelna and Nowa Wieś Ełcka—each rated at 200 MW/800 MWh, with equipment deliveries pencilled in for late 2025. Closer to home, the group announced a 11.4 MW/45 MWh array split between Águeda and Mortágua. While modest in size, that Portuguese facility will be the country’s first to guarantee eight-hour discharge and could act as a pilot for the Serpa-Alqueva transmission corridor, where solar curtailment has become routine. Financing for the broader pipeline comes from a $173 M package led by KKR, earmarked for 4.3 GW of storage projects spanning Poland, Hungary, and the UK. Greenvolt’s model is to keep roughly a quarter of completed assets on its own books—securing long-term revenue—while rotating the remainder to institutional investors hungry for stable, green cash flows.

Supply-chain headaches and the lithium question

Building batteries at this scale is not without friction. Europe still relies on third-country refineries for 80 % of processed lithium, and the upcoming EU Battery Regulation will enforce a digital “passport” tracking carbon footprints and recycled content from 2027. Greenvolt executives say their answer is twofold: lock in multi-year deals with Asian cell suppliers while lobbying Brussels to accelerate domestic lithium mining in Portugal’s Barroso region. The company is also piloting second-life applications for packs decommissioned from electric buses, hoping to shave costs and meet the bloc’s recycled-material quotas. Engineers in Aveiro concede that eight-hour systems degrade faster than shorter-cycle cousins, but they argue that software-driven dispatch strategies can stretch useful life beyond 7,500 cycles, comfortably covering a 15-year contract.

What happens next

With the first MACSE auction wrapped and Iberian regulators watching closely, industry insiders expect a flurry of southern-European tenders before the end of the decade. Should REN replicate Terna’s design, Portugal could see its own multi-GWh auction as early as 2027, coinciding with the rollout of floating offshore wind plants off Viana do Castelo. By then, Greenvolt aims to command a storage portfolio north of 5 GWh, positioning itself as a go-to integrator for utilities from Cork to Constanţa. For Portuguese households, the takeaway is simple: the march toward 100 % renewables will hinge not just on solar panels and turbines, but on the silent containers full of lithium cells that Greenvolt and its peers are racing to deploy across the continent.