Legislative Decree No. 5 of 9 January 2026 and the acceleration of renewables between targets, streamlining and sustainability

by Nicola Brignoli

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1. Introduction

With Legislative Decree No. 5 of 9 January 2026, published in the Official Gazette on 20 January 2026 and entering into force on 4 February 2026, Italy implements Directive (EU) 2023/2413 (so-called RED III), extensively amending the regulatory framework for renewable energy sources and, in particular, Legislative Decree No. 199 of 8 November 2021. The European message is clear: the 2030 objectives are not merely numerical milestones, but a test of the effective functioning of the public administration, because today the transition is also measured by administrations’ capacity to decide within timeframes compatible with investment and with the safeguarding of public interests.

The European context is well known: the revision of Directive (EU) 2018/2001 (so-called RED II) raises the Union’s overall target to 42.5% renewables in the energy mix by 2030 (with a political commitment to increase it further to 45%) and links heightened climate ambition to a key term: permitting, namely authorisation processes that are faster and more predictable.

From this perspective, the issue is not the streamlining of procedures understood as the mere removal of steps, but the construction of a decision-making model capable of reconciling, within reasonable timeframes, competing public interests. Predictability does not arise solely from shorter statutory deadlines, but from evidentiary standards, siting criteria and forms of inter-administrative cooperation that render the balancing exercise repeatable and subject to control. It is in this sense that “results” – understood as the concrete ability to enable additional renewable capacity – fully enter the realm of energy policy.

2. New targets: greater constraints (and greater responsibility)

One of the most immediate aspects of the decree is the updating of national objectives. Legislative Decree No. 5/2026 sets the target share of energy from renewable sources in gross final consumption at 39.4% by 2030.

Alongside this system-wide target, the decree also introduces an indicative objective for buildings: the share of renewable energy produced in buildings or in their vicinity (taking into account renewable energy supplied from the grid) is set at «at least 40.1%» in 2030.

In the transport sector, the reform is even more explicit: fuel suppliers (including electricity) are required to achieve, by 2030, a share of at least 29% renewables in the sector’s final consumption.

Read between the lines, these figures convey two points: (i) the decree is not merely “technical” but reallocates the burden of adjustment; and (ii) implementation inevitably becomes multi-level, because national targets are operationalised through administrative instruments (planning, authorisations, controls) involving central administrations, Regions, local authorities and technical bodies. A corollary follows: the more stringent the targets, the more decisive becomes administrative capacity to translate them into procedures that are coherent, stable and legally defensible.

There is, however, a further aspect: targets operate as indirect constraints on programming. They constrain not only the “how much” (the renewables share), but also the “how” (the sequence of instruments), because they shape both energy and spatial planning and regulatory choices concerning support mechanisms and obligations. In this sense, the challenge is not only quantitative; it is organisational. An ambitious objective increases the costs – also in terms of litigation and administrative inertia – of a fragmented or uneven authorisation system and requires the administration to possess adequate knowledge bases and stable technical expertise.

3. The authorisation lever: “acceleration areas” and tighter timelines

RED III has required Member States to rethink permitting as an infrastructure of the transition: not a purely procedural matter, but an enabling factor. In this direction, the decree aims to accelerate the deployment of new renewable plants also through the designation of “acceleration areas” (go-to areas), where procedures should be simpler and faster (with an indicative maximum timeframe of 12 months for authorisations in such areas).

The point is not only to shorten timelines, but to change the underlying logic: part of the balancing exercise is shifted “upstream”, to the selection of areas and the construction of more standardised evidentiary baselines. This may strengthen investment certainty, but – precisely because it anticipates (and compresses) the balancing – also risks relocating litigation to the quality of planning and to the coherence of its interface with other layers of protection, starting with the environment and landscape.

A further issue emerges here: acceleration works only if this upstream balancing is grounded in a robust knowledge base and in legible criteria; otherwise, speed generates a paradoxical effect – reduced time “within” the procedure, but increased external instability (appeals, interim measures, and the reopening of fact-finding). In other words, predictability is not only about certain timelines, but also about decisions that are reasonably stable. This is the condition for ensuring that shorter timeframes do not merely shift conflict from the administrative stage to the judicial stage.

4. Buildings: obligations, streamlining and “micro-permitting”

The buildings chapter is one where the tension between objectives and instruments is most evident: the decree acts both on obligations to integrate renewables and on streamlining mechanisms for systems serving buildings (typically photovoltaics, solar thermal, heat pumps, and the like).

Here the stake is not only the growth of renewable capacity, but the administration’s ability to handle mass permitting: small, distributed installations, technical standards, controls and data interoperability – together with the risk that the bottleneck shifts from major authorisations to repetitive procedures and ex post checks and – often – to grid connection stages and technical compliance, which may delay outcomes even where the enabling title is “swift”.

In this setting, genuine streamlining consists not merely in “cutting” procedures, but in enabling the administration to process large volumes uniformly: stable forms and requirements, interoperability between databases, non-contradictory technical criteria, and risk-proportionate controls. Without such an infrastructure, micro-permitting becomes the locus where inertia accumulates, producing systemic effects which, in the aggregate, affect the achievement of overall objectives.

5. Biomass and sustainability: the other side of acceleration

Streamlining is not “without conditions”. RED III insists on more robust sustainability criteria and lifecycle emissions reductions, and Legislative Decree No. 5/2026 amends the provisions of Legislative Decree No. 199/2021 concerning biofuels, bioliquids and biomass fuels, linking their accounting (and access to support schemes) to compliance with updated criteria and thresholds.

In other words: accelerate, yes – but without allowing “accounted” renewables growth to rest on supply chains that are inconsistent with genuine emissions reductions. The balance is delicate, especially because it presupposes efficient certification and control systems: if verification becomes slow or uncertain, the system risks replacing authorisation delays with “downstream” delays in reporting and validation.

Here too the theme of predictability returns: sustainability cannot be entrusted to sporadic or uneven controls, because this would generate uncertainty for operators and administrations and, at the same time, undermine the system’s credibility. The challenge is to ensure that checks are rapid yet reliable, avoiding an expansion of evidentiary burdens that would neutralise the benefits of faster authorisation.

6. Governance and implementation: the reform is worth as much as its administrative chain

A profile that is often decisive, yet less visible in a target-driven reading, concerns operational governance: acceleration requires not only leaner rules, but also actors, platforms and controls capable of coping with increased procedural flows. In practice, the model’s robustness depends on clarity of roles (between central and territorial administrations), the quality of implementing measures, and the capacity of technical bodies to ensure uniform standards (for example, in monitoring, in managing obligations and in traceability). This is where the difference between “paper streamlining” and effective streamlining is measured: timelines, data and controls must be mutually consistent, otherwise inertia is simply displaced from one segment to another.

In practical terms, this entails at least three elements. First, the standardisation of fact-finding is not a purely organisational matter, but a safeguard of substantive legality, because it allows analogous cases to be treated in a non-arbitrary manner and supports coherent reasoning. Second, digitalisation and data interoperability are not accessories, but conditions for sustaining high volumes (especially in micro-permitting) and for preventing duplicative fact-finding. Third, implementation requires a delicate balance between centralisation and decentralisation: some functions must be harmonised (standards, data, monitoring), whereas others inevitably remain territorial (spatial governance and the interface with landscape and environmental protection).

Within this framework, the administrative chain underpinning the reform becomes part of energy policy itself: speed of decision-making also depends on the quality of secondary measures, administrative practice, effective inter-administrative cooperation, and the ability to maintain controls without turning them into a second, parallel procedure.

7. Concluding remarks

Legislative Decree No. 5/2026 presents itself as a “bridging” measure: it absorbs a strong European impulse (more renewables, faster) and translates it into an administrative engineering that, to function, must be coherent on three planes: (i) planning and siting (including acceleration areas), because that is where the reduction of authorisation conflict is primarily played out; (ii) procedures and timelines, because promised speed is credible only if underpinned by standardised fact-finding, accessible data and adequate administrative expertise; and (iii) sustainability and controls, because “results” (decarbonisation) cannot be separated from the quality of supply chains and the verifiability of environmental performance.

Whether the decree will deliver an effective acceleration will therefore depend chiefly on implementation: the quality of planning (including acceleration areas), the uniformity of evidentiary standards, the effectiveness of inter-administrative coordination, and the adequacy of control arrangements. On this view, the transition is not merely a matter of targets, but of administrative capacity: governable procedures, proportionate fact-finding, accessible data and effective verification. Shorter timelines are thus not an end in themselves, but the outcome of a more stable and predictable balancing exercise, because the pursuit of results is increasingly an integral component of energy policy.

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