An independent energy company and the electric vehicle maker Tesla have announced an agreement to build a network of large-scale electricity storage facilities across Italy and Britain, in what the two firms say is the opening phase of a programme worth up to five billion dollars.
NatPower, which was founded in Italy in 2019 and has operations across seven countries, confirmed on Tuesday that it had reached a multiyear deal with Tesla to construct five initial projects with a combined storage capacity of 25 gigawatt hours. Those first sites are intended as a foundation for a much larger undertaking. The full programme aims to eventually exceed 100 gigawatt hours of storage capacity, at a construction cost the companies put at between four and five billion dollars. Over a twenty-year period, they said, the revenue generated could potentially surpass fifteen billion dollars.
Under the agreement, NatPower will use Tesla’s Megapack, a large industrial battery system designed to store electricity at the scale required to support national power grids. The company will also use Tesla’s software that manages when to buy and sell electricity on the wholesale market, allowing stored power to be released at moments of peak demand or high prices and recharged when power is cheap and plentiful. That combination of hardware and trading capability is central to how large battery projects generate returns.
Fabrizio Zago, the chief executive of NatPower, described the arrangement as solving a problem that has long frustrated the energy storage industry: the gap between having the financial backing and the technology available and actually getting projects built on time. “The sector has access to technology and capital but still struggles to deliver infrastructure consistently and within the required timelines,” he said. “What we have built with Tesla is an ecosystem that enables alignment between capital and execution, and that can be replicated across multiple markets.”
That last phrase carries significance. Both companies have framed this not merely as a deal for Italy and Britain but as a template that could be deployed elsewhere. NatPower already has operations in Kazakhstan, the United States, Canada, Tunisia and Chile, and has described its global project pipeline as totalling more than 23 gigawatts across technologies including solar, wind, battery storage and hydrogen. The suggestion is that a proven model in two established European markets could be adapted and rolled out in others.
The backdrop to this announcement is a rapid and accelerating expansion of battery storage across Europe, driven by the fundamental challenge that comes with generating large amounts of electricity from wind and sunshine. Both sources are intermittent by nature — the wind does not always blow and the sun does not always shine which means the power they produce does not always arrive at the moment it is needed. Without a way to store surplus electricity when it is generated and release it later, grids become harder to manage, renewable power sometimes has to be wasted, and expensive backup generation from fossil fuels is called upon to fill the gaps.
Battery storage solves that problem, and demand for it has grown sharply. In 2025, the global deployment of battery storage systems exceeded 100 gigawatts for the first time up 48 per cent on the previous year. In Europe specifically, investors including several major banks poured a record equivalent of around ten billion dollars into battery storage projects last year, with a further three and a half billion committed in the first three months of this year alone. Italy and Germany are currently the two most established markets for large-scale grid batteries in the European Union, with Britain also among the continent’s leaders.
As Reuters reported, countries across Europe are pushing ahead with battery storage projects as a direct response to the growth of wind and solar generation. The logic is straightforward: the more electricity a country generates from sources that cannot be controlled or predicted, the greater its need for something that can absorb that power when it arrives in surplus and hold it until it is required. Without sufficient storage capacity, the practical limit on how much renewable generation can actually be used rather than simply generated and then discarded remains stubbornly low.
Tesla’s energy business has become one of the fastest-growing parts of the company. In 2025, its energy storage division generated nearly twelve and a half billion dollars in revenue, driven by growing demand for both its large industrial battery systems and its smaller home storage products. The company has been expanding manufacturing capacity specifically to meet that demand, and has secured several major supply agreements for the battery cells used in its industrial systems. The NatPower deal adds a significant European commitment to a portfolio that already includes projects across the United Kingdom, including a collaboration with a Scottish renewables company and earlier installations that have made Britain one of the most active markets for Tesla’s large battery systems outside the United States.
Whether the full programme reaches the ambitions both parties have set out will depend on planning approvals, grid connection timelines and the regulatory environments in Italy and Britain — factors that have slowed similar projects elsewhere in Europe. The battery storage sector has generally found that securing land, permission and connection to the grid can take considerably longer than financing and procuring the equipment. NatPower’s Zago appeared to acknowledge that challenge directly when he described the new arrangement with Tesla as specifically designed to address the delivery problems that have held the industry back. The proof of whether it succeeds will come when the first sites are operational.
About the Author
Marcel Chidozie is a tech analyst and writer covering foreign news, fintech, and emerging technologies at TechRegard. Based in Nigeria, He's passionate about translating complex tech developments into compelling, accessible stories for diverse audiences. His work focuses on how technology shapes innovation across Africa and globally.
