Italy

The Italian energy system has historically been highly dependent on fossil fuel sources and extremely vulnerable to external energy shocks due to the dependency from energy imports. The Italian energy system is still based on a carbon intensive mix, with about 85% of energy demand fuelled by fossil fuels, basically oil and natural gas. Nonetheless, during last decades, several changes occurred in national energy policies, bringing the Italy system to a radical improvement in energy efficiency performance and to a growing interest in developing alternative energy sources. While traditional hydropower has constituted a large quota in the energy mix strategy from the beginning of the industrialization process after the Second World War, the increasing interest in new clean energy sources as wind and solar ones has emerged only during the last decade, due to fast liberalisation process of the electricity market at the European level and the increasing attention toward climate change issues. The main issues regarding energy in Italy are:

• The coordination across different policy domains, especially between the energy system and the industrial activities, is still far from being complete.
• The multi-level governance structure of the Italian system represents a strong barrier to the rapid transformation of central decisions regarding the energy system into operative actions across the national territory.
• There are selected sectors that are still lacking substantial policy interventions in the direction of a low carbon trajectory, where the most crucial one is the transport system.

The national Italian discourse on energy is focused on the public commitment to increase the share of renewable energy in electricity generation, the increase efforts in the liberalization process of the energy market in order to reduce energy costs for final consumers and the increase in public-private partnerships to foster investment flows in the national electric grid. This should reduce barriers in the final distribution process and improve the absorption capacity of electricity generated by renewable sources.