Energy security is often viewed through immediate indicators: installed gigawatts, mobilized investments, avoided imports, and permitting speed. Yet in photovoltaics, a significant part of the game is played long before commissioning. It is decided when a project is still a hypothesis on paper, with limited costs and real room to adjust its design or abandon it.
This was the theme highlighted at Solar & Storage Live Italia during the discussions organized by Women in Solar+ Europe (WiSEu) and the Solar+ Leaders ecosystem: leadership quality, team composition, and the discipline with which projects are selected are not separate from energy policy. Over time, they can determine how reliable, bankable, and sustainable the facilities will be for the grid and their host communities.
The reasoning stems from a structural characteristic of the sector. A photovoltaic plant is designed to operate for three decades or more, yet some of the decisions that dictate its performance, costs, and critical issues are made in the very first weeks. Site, configuration, permitting process, community engagement, connection assumptions, and technical setup enter a chain of consequences that flows from the developer to builders, financiers, operators, and ultimately the local community.
Grid congestion changes the value of choices
Letizia Petracci, Vice President Technical at Starlight Energy, a NextEnergy group company, drew attention to the Italian connection queue. Requests for new renewable plants exceed 300 GW—a volume noted as roughly four times the additional capacity targeted for 2030 by the national plan. Therefore, not all of those projects will be able to reach completion, nor would it be rational to treat them as having the same degree of maturity and utility for the system.
Furthermore, the landscape shifted in September: grid access now depends on securing authorization, rather than the chronological order in which the application was submitted. For developers, this means having to advance quickly through the permitting process without yet having the certainty of grid connection. Speed becomes necessary, but it can turn into an incentive to push weak initiatives forward just to avoid losing position.
At this stage, selection is particularly delicate. At the outset, a project can be halted at low cost; once it accumulates studies, consulting fees, permitting files, agreements, and pipeline targets, walking away becomes more difficult even if technical, territorial, or industrial constraints emerge. It is the dynamic whereby the time and resources already invested end up weighing on subsequent judgment, sometimes pushing stakeholders to defend an initiative rather than lucidly assessing its prospects.
According to Petracci, leadership is also measured by the less visible ability to decide early on which projects do not deserve to move forward. This is not a call to slow down the development of renewables, but to distinguish between speed built on expertise, organization, and sound assessments, and haste that merely passes problems down to subsequent links in the supply chain.
The effects emerge years later, when they are no longer easy to correct
David Moser, managing director Italy at Becquerel Institute, brought to the discussion the experience gained over 13 years leading a research group at Eurac in Bolzano focused on the aging and degradation of photovoltaic systems. His point is tangible: performance issues that emerge after eight or ten years can stem from initial decisions made by people who are no longer working on that plant.
An energy supply chain that exclusively rewards permitting milestones or the number of megawatts in a portfolio therefore risks disconnecting decision-makers from those who will bear the consequences. The cost of a rushed choice can fall on the asset owner, the maintenance operator, the financier left dealing with an underperforming plant, or the grid tasked with integrating capacity built without adequate planning.
The issue also touches on the credibility of the transition. The rollout of solar power requires local buy-in, grid connection capacity, and patient capital; each of these elements is undermined if projects proliferate that remain unfinished, repeatedly alter their configuration, or enter commercial operation with avoidable flaws. A well-designed plant does not eliminate grid and permitting complexities, but it prevents upstream problems from being carried over throughout its entire operational lifetime.
The discussion also highlighted caution regarding the use of artificial intelligence-based tools in photovoltaics. Moser, who currently develops AI solutions for the sector, warned that quickly obtained answers can become a shortcut if they are not accompanied by expertise and verification. For activities involving spatial data, design, forecasting, and plant analysis, digital tools can speed up work, but they do not replace the responsibility of those who validate an assumption and assess its impacts.
Inclusive teams as organizational infrastructure
WiSEu's contribution adds another dimension to the debate: the composition of the teams that select, design, and manage assets. The idea advocated during the panels is that inclusive teams with diverse skill sets enhance the ability to identify risks, challenge assumptions, and navigate often-competing interests among development, grid, finance, and local communities.
It is not about automatically attributing better outcomes to a single characteristic of individuals. The issue is organizational: complex decisions are more robust when they do not rely on a uniform perspective and when conditions exist to challenge overly optimistic assessments. In utility-scale solar, where an initial mistake can remain embedded in the asset for decades, this plurality takes on an industrial as well as a cultural value.
In this reading, energy security is not merely synonymous with the availability of electricity. It encompasses the ability to build a renewable fleet that remains operational over time, interacts with a congested grid, and avoids unnecessarily draining capital, administrative capacity, and community trust. For Italy, committed to rapidly scaling up renewable electricity generation, the difference between announced capacity and reliable capacity may depend on how the earliest phase of projects is managed.
No new regulatory measures emerged from the discussion, nor a simple solution to the connection queue. However, the message to developers, investors, and decision-makers is clear: the pressure to proceed must not sideline feasibility assessments. With grid requests far exceeding new capacity targets, carefully choosing what to authorize, finance, and build becomes part of national energy strategy, rather than an internal detail for individual companies.
