**Abstract**

Italy is the geographic area with the highest world concentration of cultural sites, landscapes with a high esthetic value, and biodiversity. Therefore, any modification in the territory is to be performed by highly considering these cultural, landscape, and natural values. Also, Italy has a high human pressure on agricultural areas, especially in flatlands, that generally have a high agronomic value. As a consequence, the planning of photovoltaic installations in agricultural areas must meet at least five basic criteria: to cause as little use as possible to the agricultural soil, to maintain agricultural activities, to strengthen or introduce natural habitats, to properly mitigate the landscape impact, and to be located as far as possible from residential areas. This chapter presents the technological innovation with a high environmental value that characterizes the photovoltaic system, called Agro-Natural-Voltaic (AnaV), also using methodological and planning schemes together with landscape simulations. Moreover, the essay gives a description of the study on the environmental impact (for the administrative procedure of the Environmental Impact Assessment), laid down for the emblematic case study.

**Keywords:** renewable energies, photovoltaic, agriculture, biodiversity, landscape

## **1. Introduction**

Italy is the geographic area with the highest world concentration of cultural sites, landscapes with very high aesthetical value, and biodiversity. It is also the country with the highest number (59) of sites on the UNESCO World Heritage List. In fact, new properties were added to the WHL: on 26 July 2021 "Padua's fourteenth-century fresco cycles and Montecatini Terme," and on 28 July the "porticoes of Bologna" and 8000 hectares of Italian forests within the transnational candidature "Primeval beech forests of the Carpathians and other Regions of Europe." In this special ranking, China is second with 56 sites and Germany is third with 50 sites.

They are prevalently cultural sites, some of which with considerable natural and landscape importance.

Therefore, any modification in the territory is to be performed by highly considering these cultural, landscape, and natural values.

The great promotion of renewable energy (especially sun and wind) has led to a conflict in Italy between those who want to preserve the landscapes and those who

want to transform them regardless of the characteristics of renewable energy projects, which very often produce a heavy bureaucratic blockage.

Before transforming a territory, the project of renewable energy must forcibly be environmentally compatible with the site concerned and not vice versa, and this is of crucial importance in the geographic case of Italy.

## **2. Photovoltaic**

There are several types of photovoltaic projects [1], as synthetically presented in **Table 1**.

Italy has greatly developed photovoltaic technology and, in this case, also its production modes. In particular, a different conceptual paradigm has been recently proposed: first, the environmental characteristics of a geographic area are studied, then, the kind of photovoltaic is defined.

The case study presented in this essay seems to be the most important "system technological innovation" that characterizes the planning of photovoltaic in Italy (as well as in all those geographic areas characterized by high environmental sensitivity).

**Figure 1** summarizes the evaluation process realized for the photovoltaic project called "Agri-Natural-Voltaic (ANaV), proposed by Tozzi Green SpA located in Mezzano (Province of Ravenna) in Italy. The project was approved in 2022 by the National Committee of Environmental Impact Assessment of the Italian Ministry of Ecological Transition<sup>1</sup> .
