Holy Solar City! Milestone Reached in the Goal to Go Green

Pope Francis’s goal was for the Vatican to run on green energy, so photovoltaic panels were installed on a Vatican-owned property outside of Rome. Today, the power generated by the sun supplies 100% of Vatican City’s energy needs.

Back in 2015, eager to “renew the dialogue” on how we are “building the future of the planet,” Pope Francis wrote a letter highlighting the need “to make a transition to a sustainable development model that reduces greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, setting the goal of climate neutrality.”

This installation was meant to “ensure” not only the power supply of the radio station existing there but also the complete energy support of Vatican City State.” In 2022, the Vatican joined the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, a global agreement among nations to address “dangerous human interference with the climate system.” Today, Pope Francis’s dream is a reality,  with a photovoltaic roof installed in the Courtyard of the Corazze entrance and an agrivoltaics plant, where solar panels coexist with crops, livestock, or both, set up on the Holy See’s property at Santa Maria di Galeria. Vatican City has become the eighth country – after Albania, Bhutan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Iceland, Nepal, and Paraguay – to generate 100% of its electricity from renewable sources.