Good afternoon. Thank you all for being here. I of course wish to thank the Mayor of Catania, Enrico Trantino, the President of the Region, Renato Schifani, Minister Fitto and Minister Nello Musumeci, the Chief Executive Officer of Invitalia, Bernardo Mattarella, and the Chief Executive Officer of Enel, Flavio Cattaneo, who is hosting us today. My thanks and greetings also go to the Prefect and all authorities present. 
I am very pleased to be here, I am very pleased to be in Catania, especially on such an important day for the city, perhaps the most important day of the year: the Festival of Saint Agatha.
I therefore also wish to thank Mayor Trantino for giving me the opportunity, with his invitation, to see what is recognised as being one of the three most popular religious events in the world for the first time in person. The story that links Saint Agatha to the people of Catania is a long, age-old story, full of love; it is a story of faith, a story of devotion, a story about identity and tradition. These are all things that I believe are worth defending, especially at this time. I am therefore very pleased to also have this opportunity, in the margins of the initiative we are pursuing here.

Allow me to take this opportunity to make a small digression, because while I was on my way here I read a news item that really took me aback: another young girl, 13 years old, has fallen victim to group violence. I want to say that I am particularly struck by the fact that, on this very day when a young, female Christian martyr is being celebrated, we are faced with another incredibly young female victim of sexual violence. I am saying this to express my sympathy to her, her family and her boyfriend, and to say that the State will be there and that the State will ensure justice is done. I apologise for this digression, but I was really struck by this news.

As I was saying, on a day when tradition is being celebrated, we have come here to talk above all about innovation; in particular, we have come to talk about new technologies applied to the climate-energy nexus. In this area, which some have renamed “Etna Valley”, the challenge being pursued is to make Catania one of Europe’s most important industrial hubs for the production of state-of-the-art, high-performance photovoltaic panels. One must clearly consider that we are talking about a sector that is booming: a market growth capacity of approximately 50% in five years is expected; in 2028, turnover is estimated to reach around EUR 150 billion. Italy, the Mezzogiorno, Sicily, Catania, have decided to believe in this challenge. I am here personally today because the Government intends to do its part. I believe we must and we want to be competitive in this sector.

Flavio Cattaneo and Bernardo Mattarella both said this: we want to be and we must be competitive in this sector; we can be competitive also compared with the other major international players who, as we know, are above all Asian. We of course need to believe in this and work on it. In 2021, Enel decided to believe in the idea that a group of young professionals had had a few years before, leading to the planning of Europe’s first gigafactory for the production of innovative photovoltaic panels with a capacity of 3 gigawatts. So, where it is not possible to be competitive in terms of lower production costs, the focus is on higher quality, which has always been Italy’s strength and is what we must continue to back, because this is what makes the difference.
The goal now is to make the gigafactory operational, to start producing, to manage to produce five million photovoltaic panels per year. Among other things, this means increasing employment levels, with around 709 people to be hired in 2024, plus approximately 1,000 new jobs in related companies. It means a huge investment, as has already been mentioned by those who spoke before me, for a total of more than EUR 700 million, of which EUR 520 million guaranteed by Enel and the remaining amount (almost EUR 190 million) by the European Union’s Innovation Fund and the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP).
This brings us to the specific reason why we are here today. The NRRP is making almost EUR 90 million available for this project. Based on these resources, Invitalia, which manages these incentives, has drawn up a development contract with Enel, which we are here today to sign. This development contract will allow for the necessary work to be carried out to adapt and upgrade the existing plant, but will also allow us to build a new plant spanning approximately 50 thousand square metres for another photovoltaic panel production line. 
Now, this is what is happening today, but allow me to reflect for a moment on the fact that this is all part of an overall strategy and the very complex, and rather difficult, work that this Government has done to strengthen that strategy.
Starting with the NRRP itself: if we go back in time to a year ago, there were all those warnings and people raising alarms about whether Italy had the ability, whether it would be fit, able and competitive enough with regard to spending the resources of what was Europe’s largest National Recovery and Resilience Plan. As you may remember, that ability was called into question. So, today, a year on, I want to say – and I want to do so with sincere thanks to Minister Raffaele Fitto in particular for the work he has done over the last year, as well as to all the other administrations that have helped him and us – that, by the end of 2023, Italy had received payment for the third NRRP instalment, it had submitted the milestones and targets for the fourth instalment, it had received payment for the fourth instalment, and it was the first nation in Europe to submit its milestones and targets for the fifth instalment. So much for being a tail-ender in implementing the NRRP. 
While we were doing this work, we also requested and completed the revision of our NRRP. Also in this regard, you will recall some saying that if Italy were ever to attempt to renegotiate its Plan to take into account the fact that the context had changed compared with when the first version was drawn up, then this would have led to NRRP resources being lost. Instead, not only are we not losing resources, but we have also renegotiated the NRRP. Why? To ensure those resources are more in line with our priorities. The revision of the NRRP has allowed us to free up EUR 21 billion and so, for example, we have been able to focus on our production system. EUR 12 billion are dedicated to businesses, with various resources allocated to the agricultural sector, for example. I don’t want to digress too much, but this is being talked about a lot in these days: the NRRP resources dedicated to farmers, who are of particular importance to us, go from EUR 5 billion to EUR 8 billion; we have also focused over EUR 6 billion on Transition 5.0, for example, which is precisely about boosting the energy efficiency of our production system; likewise, we have allocated EUR 5 billion to energy infrastructure.
Why am I saying this? I am saying this because it is a strategy, on the one hand clearly to guarantee energy supplies, to do so working on the ecological transition, and to do so without running the risk of moving from one dependency to another, which may be equally as problematic. In other words, the problem that was not taken into due consideration when we were raising the need for environmental sustainability was: firstly, that environmental sustainability had to also be social and economic sustainability; and, secondly, that we had to control our key supply chains. It doesn’t make much sense for us to free ourselves from our energy dependency on Russia to only then hand ourselves over to other energy dependencies regarding supply chains that we equally cannot control.

Today’s project responds to this. We need to be able to produce the technology that is crucial for our strategic choices, if we want to be masters of our own destiny. This is why we are investing even more in this initiative and this project. This is why we are convinced that, in this energy challenge, Italy can even aim to be the energy supply hub for the rest of Europe.
In our view, Italy’s south, its Mezzogiorno, has a key role to play in this strategic project. You have also seen all the work we are doing at foreign policy level: the ‘Mattei Plan for Africa’ and our focus on Africa. Also in this regard, Italy can become the gateway for that share of energy we cannot produce ourselves, that other nations produce and can export to Europe, passing via Italy, through adequate connection infrastructure, which we are working on. So, as you can see, all aspects of this work form part of a line of reasoning.

I mentioned the Mezzogiorno, because this is also very important. It is very important that an industrial hub like this one, making us a flagship in Europe, has been established in Sicily, in Catania, in Italy’s Mezzogiorno. This is also part of precise work and a precise strategy by this Government, which can be seen in several very complex and what I believe to be very useful things that it has done over the last year. Take all the work we have done on Development and Cohesion Funds, for example, again thanks to our relationship with the European Commission and the ability we have to try and be even more effective and even more efficient. We often complain that there aren’t enough resources, and, don’t get me wrong, everyone wishes there were more, but there is also another problem: sometimes the resources are there but are not spent. When we entered office, we carried out a study into the Development and Cohesion Funds (the purpose of which is to combat territorial disparities and so they are clearly particularly useful in the Mezzogiorno, where indeed 80% of these resources go), only to discover that, for the previous programming period that ended in 2020, as at 2022, only EUR 46 billion had been spent out of the EUR 126 billion available. Is this something we can afford to happen? No, it is not. So, something was perhaps not right with how things worked. 

We carried out this survey work with all the Regions and passed the ‘Decreto Sud’ [‘decree for the South’] to reorganise these funds, establishing ‘Cohesion Agreements’. According to these Cohesion Agreements, resources are distributed based on proposals put forward by each Region, which are shared by the Central Government to ensure that everything forms part of the same strategy; if funds are not spent, we can withdraw funding and use those resources on other proposals; if there are delays, we can intervene with substitute powers.
In a few weeks’ time, we will present the Development and Cohesion Agreement with Sicily, which we are working on with President Schifani, whom I thank. This agreement involves one of the most significant funding amounts, again for strategic works projects. The days of Italy not spending available resources are over. Every single euro must be spent in order to solve citizens’ problems.

I would like to close by also mentioning the single SEZ for the Mezzogiorno. We were successful in this challenge and no Government before us had ever managed to do this very important thing, to negotiate this very important thing with the European Commission. As you know, Special Economic Zones are areas in which those who make investments have the right to receive tax credits, so tax relief and an easing of the administrative burden. Before, we had several small Special Economic Zones, but for tomorrow we have a single Special Economic Zone for the whole of Italy’s Mezzogiorno. 
This means that whoever invests anywhere in Italy’s Mezzogiorno will have the right to those incentives, to those tax credits, to that reduced red tape. Why? Because I do not want a South that lives off subsidies. I want a South that has what it needs to allow Italy’s Mezzogiorno to compete on an equal footing. There is a gap, and we must build what is needed to bridge that gap, so that Italy’s Mezzogiorno can finally show its worth without the discrimination it has faced in the past. 

Thank you, and I wish you all the best with your work.

[Courtesy translation]