Analysts at Jefferies & Company Ltd have said that, according to their sources, Italys 3rd Conto Energia will be extended to August 31 instead of May 31, meaning that the new regulation would take effect on September 1, as opposed to June 1.
They say that the new regulation should have been signed today, and that there is a "modest upside" to the draft regulation, which was submitted last week.
In a Reuters report, Jean-Francois Meymandi, analyst at UBS Investment Bank, explains that the three-month extension would help some investors to complete their projects. However, it would not trigger any new investment in the sector.
"It does not make any change in terms of new installed capacity and it just consumes more of the budget allocated to solar energy," he states.
Meanwhile, the Jefferies analysts say that Italys regional governments have pushed for a number of amendments, including increasing the proposed tariffs, and raising the definition of small systems to one MW for both roof and ground-mounted systems.
They go on to say that extending the uncapped "small projects" to one MW qualifies an additional 1.5 to two gigawatts (GW) of photovoltaic installations. They add that the 200 kilowatt (kW) to one MW class is the largest at 36 percent of cumulative installations in the country to date.
Of the Save Alcoa declarations, continue the analysts, 50 percent, or 1.9 GW, comprise systems between 200 kW and one MW in size. Another 21 percent, or 809 MW, is one to five MW. Discounting 288 MW in this class, they say, which was already installed in the first quarter of 2011, there remains an incremental 1.5 to two GW that would qualify as uncapped "small projects".
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