A field of Vatican Radio antennas north of Rome is about to get a new job: making the world's smallest country energy self-sufficient.

  • 424 hectares of land involved, nearly 10 times the size of Vatican City itself
  • 80–90 megawatts of planned generating capacity
  • €100 million (about $117 million) estimated project cost
  • 1957 the year Vatican Radio began broadcasting from the same site

Vatican City is the world's smallest sovereign state, just over 100 acres, with fewer than 1,000 residents, and it has always bought its electricity from Italy's grid. A renewable plant this size would be a rare case of the world's tiniest country reaching full energy independence.

A radio field becomes a solar field

The land sits at Santa Maria di Galeria, Vatican property under a 1951 agreement with Italy that grants it the same special legal status as Vatican Radio's transmission facilities, including exemptions from Italian taxes. Since 1957, the site's job has been beaming shortwave broadcasts across continents from a forest of antenna masts rising out of open farmland.

Now the Vatican and the Italian government have signed off on turning most of that same land into an agrivoltaic energy plant, with tracking solar panels expected to cover roughly 200 of the property's 424 hectares while farming continues underneath and around them.

Farming and solar power, side by side

Agrivoltaic systems mount panels high enough, and space them wide enough, that crops or grazing animals can keep using the land beneath. For the Vatican, that matters: Santa Maria di Galeria has been farmed for decades, and the plan keeps that use intact rather than paving over it.

At an estimated 80 to 90 megawatts, the facility would rank among Italy's largest agrivoltaic installations, according to reporting on the project. That's enough, backers say, to cover all of Vatican City's electricity needs, a notable goal for a city-state that currently imports every watt it uses.

The project was a priority for the late Pope Francis, the first pontiff to accept the scientific consensus on climate change, and has been endorsed by Pope Leo XIV.

A priority carried forward

Pope Francis pushed the Vatican toward climate action for years, including a 2015 encyclical on environmental stewardship and a smaller 2,400-panel solar array already installed on the roof of the Paul VI Audience Hall inside Vatican City. The Santa Maria di Galeria project scales that ambition up dramatically, and its continuation under Pope Leo XIV signals it is now institutional policy rather than one pope's pet initiative.

Construction timelines haven't been finalized, and as of early September 2026 the field itself still holds only antennas, not panels. But with the bilateral agreement signed and financing estimated near €100 million, the Vatican is positioned to go from importing all of its electricity to generating more than it needs, on the same patch of countryside it has occupied since the 1950s.