Italy’s energy sector has a new face. It is young, spread across the country, and produces ideas the rest of the world has yet to see.

There are those who have taught satellites to follow the sun, those who have built a turbine that listens to the wind, those using industrial sulfur to build the batteries of the future, and those turning CO2 into a stable marine solution that can remain in the ocean for 10,000 years.

The Sunflower Looks to the Stars

They were 24 when they decided that space could be the right place to help save the planet.

Marco Sala, Filippo Oggionni, Aleksander Fiuk and Michał Grendysz — aerospace engineers trained at Milan Polytechnic and Delft University of Technology — founded Revolv Space with an idea no one had yet turned into hardware: to do in orbit what sunflowers do in fields. Follow the sun. Always.

Their device weighs less than 500 grams and can transfer up to 500 watts, solving a fundamental problem for small satellites: Without continuous orientation, onboard power can plummet.

“The satellite points wherever it needs to. The panels keep looking at the sun anyway,” says CEO Marco Sala.

Already, 27 units are operating across four space missions. Now comes the company’s biggest validation yet: Revolv is supplying its devices for a NASA mission, PolSir — two satellites designed to study the global climate — through Blue Canyon Technologies, one of the leading U.S. space systems integrators.

They started out as students in Milan. Today, their technology is part of a NASA mission.

And if the journey moves from space to below sea level, the challenge remains the same.

The Sea That Swallows CO2

When Google, Stripe and Shopify are looking for companies to entrust with removing carbon from the atmosphere, they turn to the Frontier consortium, which has committed $2 billion through 2040. Frontier has chosen an Italian company.

It is called Limenet, led by 30-year-old Stefano Cappello, and it is the first Italian company to secure an agreement with the consortium: $500,000 to remove 330 tons of CO2.

Its patented technology converts carbon dioxide into calcium bicarbonates, which are released into the sea, where they remain stable for thousands of years. In Augusta, Sicily, Limenet’s facility is among the world’s largest in terms of marine CO2-storage capacity.

“In just over two years, we went from the laboratory to a working pilot plant,” Cappello says. “Now we want to bring the technology to an industrial scale.”

If some are looking at the sea for answers, others are finding them in an unexpected place: refineries.

Alessandra Accogli saw the fossil-fuel industry not as an enemy, but as a source of solutions. An engineer, CEO and Co-Founder of Milan-based startup Sinergy Flow, founded in 2022 with Gabriele Panzeri and Matteo Salerno, she has turned sulfur — a refinery byproduct often treated as costly waste — into the core of a new generation of flow batteries capable of storing renewable energy for eight to 24 consecutive hours.

Technology is independent of the geopolitical monopolies surrounding lithium and cobalt. It offers a concrete response to the oldest problem facing renewables: The sun does not always shine, and the wind does not always blow. But the power grid cannot afford to take breaks.

“Europe is facing one of the deepest crises in its history. Technologies like ours are essential to rebuilding energy independence and competitiveness,” Accogli says.

After closing a €7 million funding round in 2026, the startup is aiming to build its first large-scale commercial plant by 2028.

The Turbine That Listens to the Wind

In Pisa, someone has decided to tame the wind.

“Solar power is currently the leading solution for generating energy on site. Gevi aims to provide more continuous and flexible production, overcoming the constraints of intermittency,” says Giuseppe Amburgia, CEO of Gevi.

The Pisa-based startup, founded in 2022 by three Tuscan engineers — Emanuele Luzzati, Edoardo Simonelli and Soufiane Essakhi — has a clear goal: to bring wind power to places it has never reached before.

Its vertical-axis micro wind turbine uses artificial intelligence to adjust the angle of its blades every hundredth of a second. Compact and quiet, it starts operating at wind speeds of just 2.4 meters per second and produces 3 kilowatts at cruising speed. In strong winds, loads can be reduced by up to 80%.

The turbine is designed for rooftops, urban areas, industrial sites and agricultural settings — places traditional wind power has largely overlooked.

In Italy, a kilowatt-hour costs 34.5 euro cents: 2.3 times the global average, twice as much as in France and five times as much as in China. Europe has put energy sovereignty at the top of its political agenda.

But while continental strategies move forward at their own pace, four Italian startups have decided not to wait, building the energy transition piece by piece — from space to the depths of the Mediterranean, from refineries to the hills around Pisa.

Climate change is not waiting.

And neither are they.

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