Italy’s strategy to save Piano-Corriere.it

The nodes of the Recovery they are not dissolved, the ripples between Rome and Brussels are not smoothed out. Skepticism about Italy’s ability to implement the National Recovery Plan (Pnrr) in the right times and ways has spread within the EU Commission. Within the government, it is suspected that the stiffening of Brussels on projects already approved previously – the stadiums in Florence and Venice – is also contributed by the temptation in some Northern European countries to demonstrate that the Recovery cannot work: if this were the case, then the experiment would not be repeatable. It is therefore not surprising if the discussion remains open on the problems raised in Brussels on the payment of the third installment of 19 billion euros. The Commission thinks that Italy is too timid about opening up port concessions to the market. In Italy, on the other hand, a survey of comparable licenses in the rest of Europe has begun, to demonstrate that Brussels’ approach is prejudicial. Yet it seems implausible that a compromise will not be reached within a few weeks.

Projects, reforms, strengthening in management

The 19 billion installment will probably arrive. It will then be clearer that the game of the Italian Pnrr is played elsewhere, on three different levels: the rewriting of the projects, the reckoning on the reforms, the strengthening of management. We see. Raffaele Fitto, Minister of European Affairs, aims to present the six-monthly report on the Pnrr by the beginning of May. At that point it will be understood which projects and for which sums are so far behind that they cannot be implemented by the 2026 deadline and which ones seem unsustainable. There won’t be many. At the end of 2022, Italy had spent just 34% of the total 126 billion (between Brussels and national resources) of the package of ordinary European funds for 2014-2020. It is inevitable that the same problems will recur for the approximately two hundred billion of the Pnrr to be spent by 2026.

The shifting of some vices on traditional EU funds

On the nursery schools, the offices in charge have already requested a postponement beyond 2026 which Brussels will not grant. On the “community houses” – territorial health projects – some regions do not have the funds to ensure the stable functioning of the structures after having built it with the resources of the Pnrr. The government will therefore try to drop some projects and move others to traditional European funds, because there they would have at least three more years for implementation. The EU Commission accepts that some plans migrate to other funding chapters, but the most difficult test for Italy is another: to replace the projects that leave the Pnrr with new valid projects and feasible by 2026, while in parallel Italy presents its plans for RePowerEU (the European program for transition and energy independence). For this the heart of the work now identify alternative projects to be presented in detail in June.

Two directors

Two guidelines are emerging for Repower, with spending projects of between 20 and 40 billion in addition to the Recovery. The first concerns the infrastructure plans of publicly controlled energy companies. For Terna, the drafting of a grid that will strengthen the transmission capacity towards the North of electricity from the solar fields of the South and North Africa should be co-financed. Enel could apply for co-financing a second advanced photovoltaic panel factory, in addition to the one in Catania, after the company had announced one to be built in the United States to intercept green subsidies from the White House. Enel also interested in the plan to activate a new fixed regasification terminal in the South: one of its projects in Porto Empedocle in contention with that of Iren and Sorgenia on Gioia Tauro. Eni and Snam are jointly submitting a project to capture CO2 in high-emission plants (cement, tiles, steel), liquefaction, transport and storage in exhausted fields off the coast of Ravenna. That plan would reduce the cost of products, which would no longer have to pay for emissions.

A third floating regasification terminal

The government also welcomes Snam’s co-financing of the pipeline on the Adriatic line from Puglia to the province of Bologna. Which is also thinking of a third floating regasification terminal worth 400 million euros, after those in Ravenna and Piombino. A second part of the RePower, to which new projects can be added from funds released by the Pnrr, concerns the only way to absorb funds quickly and (hopefully) efficiently: tax credits for businesses and households. For the latter, they would be aimed at improving the energy classes of buildings (but with incentives well below 100%, so that private individuals co-finance the works on their properties); for businesses, the incentives would be aimed at reducing emissions and perhaps also at installing technologies. To arrive at these scenarios, they serve for two steps. The first: to dissolve Brussels’ doubts that essential reforms of administration and justice are in quicksand. The second: to set up a credible team at Palazzo Chigi of 70 expert officials, including four general managers, as soon as the ad hoc decree is converted in three weeks. Every hour counts, the critical phase of the Pnrr has just begun.