Greenvolt Powers OMS with Rooftop Solar, Boosting Italian Steel Sustainability

• Greenvolt Next installs 1-MW rooftop solar array for steel-forging firm OMS in Piedmont, cutting energy costs and 560 t CO₂ yearly across nine factory roofs.

Italy’s heavy-industry sector just notched another clean-energy milestone. Greenvolt Next, the distributed-generation arm of Portuguese renewables group Greenvolt, has completed a 1-MW rooftop solar installation for hot-steel-forging specialist OMS SpA at its Salassa plant in Piedmont.

Spread across nine production halls, the system comprises 1,998 high-efficiency photovoltaic modules that blanket roughly 4,700 m² of industrial roof space—most of which was stripped and re-clad during the retrofit. The array is expected to generate around 1.2 GWh a year, covering a sizable share of OMS’s daytime electricity demand and trimming the company’s carbon footprint by an estimated 560 t of CO₂ annually.

Mitia Cugusi, president of Greenvolt Next Italy, said the project shows that “even energy-intensive, traditionally hard-to-abate industries can tap decentralised renewables to cut costs and emissions without disrupting operations.” The installation was delivered under Greenvolt Next’s turnkey model, which bundles design, permitting, construction, and long-term maintenance into a single contract so clients can unlock savings from day one with no upfront capital outlay.

OMS, founded in 1969, produces precision-forged components for the automotive, railway, and oil-and-gas sectors—markets where energy costs weigh heavily on margins and customers increasingly demand verifiable sustainability credentials. Managing Director Roberto Mosca said the solar upgrade “strengthens our competitiveness at a time when steelmakers face volatile power prices and tightening emissions targets.”

For Greenvolt, the project extends a fast-growing Italian portfolio that now tops 1,200 commercial and industrial PV systems totaling roughly 150 MW. The company is betting on rooftop solar to accelerate as Rome pushes toward its 2030 target of 70 GW of cumulative solar capacity and rolls out tax credits for energy-efficiency improvements on factories and warehouses.

Analysts note that while Italy leads Europe in residential solar penetration, large-scale self-consumption in heavy industry still lags. Rising grid tariffs and looming CBAM (Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism) duties on carbon-intensive imports, however, are nudging manufacturers toward on-site renewables and storage. Projects like OMS’s, they say, offer a template for decarbonising even the most heat-intensive production lines without compromising output.

With the panels now live and feeding clean power straight into furnaces, Piedmont’s famous steelworks may have just forged a path other Italian manufacturers will follow.