Tirreno Power

THE COMEBACK POWERING ITALY’S SUSTAINABLE FUTURE

RECHARGING AN ENERGY RENAISSANCE

Rising phoenix-like from the ashes of an intricate economic downturn, we celebrate 20 years of Tirreno Power – the leading Italian electricity provider powering renewable energy production. General Manager, Fabrizio Allegra, explores the three pillars of a successful turnaround

Writer: Phoebe Harper | Project Manager: Jordan Levey

20 years is an important milestone for any company. To achieve it, we have had to face many important economic, technological, and socio-cultural changes in order to deal with a complex and shifting scenario.”

Tirreno Power stands as one of Italy’s leading electricity producers. As of 2022, the company’s portfolio amounted to an available capacity of approximately 2,500 megawatts (MW) and 5,400 Gigawatt hours (GWh) of energy fed into the grid. That same year, Tirreno Power covered the annual electricity needs of roughly two million households.

As a major player within both thermoelectricity, and increasingly, hydroelectricity, Tirreno Power’s significance cannot be underplayed as a contributor to the security of the nation’s electricity system through the provision of energy that is both flexible and sustainable.

The company’s sizable footprint currently extends to three thermoelectric operations on the Tyrrhenian coast – Vado Ligure (Savona), Torrevaldaliga Sud (Civitavecchia) and Napoli Levante. Collectively, these sites host four combined cycle gas turbines (CCGT) fuelled by natural gas.

Meanwhile, the renewables side of the business firmly establishes Tirreno Power as the leading hydroelectric producer in Liguria in terms of installed capacity, with 18 hydroelectric plants located along the Ligurian Alps and Apennines.

Yet, the prowess of the company today has not always been the case. As 2023 marks Tirreno Power’s 20th anniversary, this seminal milestone is worthy of celebration as the past two decades have witnessed a turbulent history that has seen the company forced to navigate the ever-changing undercurrents of the wholesale electricity market and a volatile economic climate.

ZEUS LIEBHERR

R 980 demolition

200 tons

60 mt UHD

Focus: Lowering boilers

The boiler lowering procedure in the power plant in Vado Ligure (SV Italy) is, for Tirreno Power, an intervention with great attention to detail, carried out with new technologies configured ad hoc to guarantee safety and sustainability.

Armofer Cinerari Luigi srl, the Italian decommissioning leader, based in Siziano (PV) and operating in Italy since 1961, took over the Tirreno Power site in Vado Ligure in July 2021 to undertake the complete decommissioning of the two decommissioned VL3 and VL4 thermoelectric groups.

After the decommissioning of the plant’s insulating materials and the preliminary stages of demolition, having completed all the structural studies and executive details of the steam generators demolition project, Armofer is tackling the work at the heart of the plants: the boilers lowering, completed in January 2023.

Armofer employed state of the art technology, configuring its own hydraulic system.

Drawing on the experience gained in a long series of similar interventions (seven boilers in the last two or three years, all over Italy), Armofer’s Lowering System 2500 is a modular system, consisting of hydraulic jacks and dywidag bars, configured according to the needs of Armofer’s technicians, with the most up-todate technology, in synergy with Enerpac.

The hydraulic lowering system has now become the standard required by the market for the high safety guarantees it offers. In fact, this technology drastically reduces the presence of operating personnel at height, in situations of potential risk due to the height and the use of oxyhydrogen flames for sectioning.

The particular flexibility of the configuration of the Armofer system makes it unique and capable of adapting to the static scheme of the structures, according to the needs of the engineers who, prior to the intervention, study the static scheme of the structure and prepare the methods for taking charge and operating

the system.

The hydraulic rappelling system, conceptually, is quite simple. Its application, on the contrary, is extremely complex. The huge boiler is housed inside an imposing 60 metre high steel girder structure, which supports the actual boiler. It is suspended from the castle by tie rods anchored in the roof. Due to the thermal expansion of the metals of which the boilers are made, they need to be suspended and not rest on the ground. The sophisticated modular hydraulic system consisting of several hydraulic jacks and very high-strength threaded rods is housed in the roof of the plant yoke and the rods are anchored to the boiler body. The system conceptually replaces the original fixed rods.

At this point the structure in charge of the progressive lowering hydraulic system, physically sectioned into each of its accessory parts of piping and installations, is lowered into the castle itself in successive cycles.

It is a matter of monitoring the planned descent, being able to intervene punctually in each part and appropriately alternating the rappelling cycles with the demolition phases of the building from the ground, for the part that remains correctly exposed and accessible to the mechanical demolition excavators.

In the field of demolition from the ground, the biggest machines of the ‘red fleet’ are the Liebherr 960 demolition and the Liebherr 974 demolition.

For the demolition to succeed safely, it is a matter of correctly orchestrating the procedure by calculating every action down to the last detail. There are many variables, and the work begins with analysing the existing static scheme in order to configure the new static scheme with the jacks, calculating their number (which must always be suitably redundant), position, individual calibration, etc. The access to the base created to be able to work with the mechanical excavator is also studied in advance and dimensioned.

Once in place, the hydraulic system remains in

operation for the entire duration of the overall demolition of the 60 metre high building. Each basic rappelling cycle, corresponding to a vertical movement of 70cm, takes around 20 minutes, with a team of nine people on site. The abseiling phase requires lowering the artefact by approximately 15 metres. The ‘lowering’ therefore takes a couple of days each time, then the part that has become accessible (about 15 metres) is demolished by the excavator on the ground. A new lowering phase is repeated, and so on until the entire artefact is brought to the ground.

The modularity of the Armofer Lowering System can count on 36 hydraulic jacks capable of carrying around 103 tonnes each, and leaves the designers with the greatest flexibility in configuration and ease of set-up. There are therefore no limits to the weights to be handled, nor to the heights that can be covered with the modular dywidag bar system.

The Armofer Lowering System 2500 places great emphasis on completely safe operation. The system is semi-automatic and requires explicit manual confirmation by the technicians in charge that they have carefully carried out all the necessary verification procedures to be repeated every time a partial lowering takes place. In addition, the automatic control system constantly displays the load distribution at each point in real time. An automatic safety lockout system comes into operation should it detect an unforeseen drop in pressure at any point.

Scheme of operation

On the right is the lowering system used on the Vado Ligure units, for each phase. The unit to be moved, totalling 1,950 tonnes, was divided into two blocks for safety reasons, thanks to the configuration of the object consisting of the actual combustion chamber and the economiser, which can be “easily” separated from each other with appropriate service sections.

Phase 1: Lowering VL3

Weight: 867 tonnes

Employed: 18 jacks, capacity 103 ton/each.

Lowering cycles: 4 cycles x 15 m each.

Status: 24/05-16/06 2022

Phase 2: Lowering VL3

Weight: 1,585 tonnes

Employed: 24 jacks, capacity 103 ton/cad.

Lowering cycles: 4 cycles x 15 m c ad.

Status: 7/09-6/10 2022

Phase

Weight: 903 tonnes

Employed: 18 jacks, capacity 103 tons/cad.

Lowering cycles: 4 cycles x 15 m each

Status: 09/11-01/12 2022

Phase

Weight: 1,480 tonnes

Employed: 24 jacks, capacity 103 tons/each.

Lowering cycles: 4 cycles x 15 m c ad.

Status: 16/12/ 2022 - 20/01/2023

combustion chamber

economiser

3: Lowering VL4 combustion chamber

4: Lowering VL4 economiser

As General Manager of Tirreno Power, Fabrizio Allegra is all too aware of the evolution and successful journey of transformation that has led the company to where it is today.

“We have had to face many challenges in these 20 years, but we have come out stronger and with greater resilience and awareness of our skills and knowledge,” he continues.

RIDING OUT THE STORM

Well-equipped with extensive industry experience having worked at the leading global utility Enel, both in Italy and at an international level, Allegra joined Tirreno Power as General Manager in the midst of a bleak period for the company.

At the time of his entrance in 2015, Tirreno Power was weathering what has been described as a ‘perfect storm’, resulting from the thermoelectric sector being plunged into crisis following the economic downturn and subsequent recession of 2014. In addition, that same year,

Tirreno Power was forced to stop the production in its coal plant at Vado Ligure. This led to the implementation of a restructuring agreement, finalised in 2015.

In dire straits, a successful turnaround strategy and the implementation of an industrial plan was required to bring Tirreno Power out of the mire and into the future – one that has been driven by a change-oriented team geared towards operational efficiency, energy management and the recovery of investments to improve the plant’s performance. For Allegra, this successful pivot has been broken down into three key pillars.

“Our strategy has been focused on our technical assets, people, and stakeholders, since we believe that they are the key to making our company grow,” he says.

“The reliability of our plants, the talent and commitment of our people, and strong stakeholder relations based on the sustainability of our

EME OUTLOOK: WHY IS TIRRENO POWER CONSIDERING STORAGE PROJECTS?

FABRIZIO ALLEGRA, GENERAL MANAGER: “From the point of view of energy flow management, our sites are located on crucial nodes of the national grid. For this reason, they are particularly suitable for this kind of application which is devoted to the provision of services to the transmission system operator (TSO). To date, we have studied from a technicaleconomic point of view various possible applications for electrochemical batteries in some of our sites. Since these plants still need support mechanisms to be economically feasible, we expect the final regulation of the sector to fully support the projects we are developing.”

Fabrizio Allegra, General Manager of Tirreno Power

business are fundamental to endure and succeed in today’s energy sector.”

Reflecting the company’s continued and unrelenting emphasis on these three areas, Tirreno Power has been able to completely repay the remaining debt initially owed to finance the revamping of its plants

involved in the restructuring of 2015.

This is no small feat, considering that this debt amounted to €1 billion. Nevertheless, the company is successfully back in the black, having completed its challenging financial turnaround three years in advance of the schedule originally laid out in its ambitious industrial plan.

AN AGENT OF CHANGE

The turnaround of Tirreno Power is remarkable not just as a story of survival, but as a model for how the company leveraged its transformation to reinvent itself as a critical driver in Italy’s energy transition.

The company’s commitment to furthering the energy transition was made clear in 2016 with its decision to entirely phase out its coal power plant. This bold move set Tirreno Power apart by recognising its role in the energy transition, and is a standpoint that it continues to stand firmly by today.

“We made this decision way ahead of time, rather than waiting for 2025

“STORAGE PLANTS REPRESENT ONE OF THE NEW FRONTIERS OF OUR SECTOR AND PROPER REGULATION IS OF THE ESSENCE TO SUPPORT THIS PROSPECT”

– FABRIZIO ALLEGRA, GENERAL MANAGER, TIRRENO POWER

Dam in Giacopiane lake (Liguria)

SIMIC SpA was established in 1975 by Giuseppe Ginola and Ferruccio Boveri, who are still running the company, to initially provide light carpentry, industrial plant installations and maintenance work.

In 1981, the small company took a new form, specialising in the field of heavy carpentry and began to focus on the manufacturing of pressure equipment and heat exchangers, while the installation activity grew alongside.

With experience in the engineering, manufacturing, assembly and maintenance of industrial plants, SIMIC has grown and diversified its portfolio. It is now active in various sectors and able to offer to its clients a comprehensive range of products and services for industrial plant design, manufacturing, installation and maintenance.

SIMIC is divided in two main departments focused on different areas of competence: the manufacturing division is mainly focused on petrochemicals, oil and gas, scientific research, nuclear and fusion energy. Site erection and maintenance division is focused on the food industries, chemical, power plant, pharmaceutical, fashion, and tobacco sectors.

Across all sectors, SIMIC offers a complete installation and maintenance service, taking care of the mechanical, electrical, instrumental and pneumatic part, being able to offer a partial plant installation as well as a turnkey plant. SIMIC also specialises in plant dismantling, relocation, and

maintenance services all over the world.

“In all our fields, we uptake turnkey plans to be erected from A to Z, including procurement, equipment, installation and commissioning,” says Mr Renato Ginola, Commercial Director of SIMIC’s site erection and maintenance division.

SIMIC also offers the possibility of doing maintenance on a global service, which means taking an entire plant and carrying out both ordinary and extraordinary maintenance.

The site erection and maintenance activities are carried out in Italy and abroad where, in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Germany, Romania, France and Turkey, SIMIC has already established a permanent base with its strong international experience and highly skilled staff to support its site erection and maintenance activities.

“In the food industry, for example, we have followed our customers around the world in their new plant installations,” Ginola noted. “If they open up a new facility abroad, and request SIMIC to undertake the works for them, we are more than happy to oblige.

“We are probably going to invest more in the future to have a higher capacity to respond to the new, upcoming markets we are trying to focus on, namely energy, research fields, conventional nuclear and fusion energy, while still maintaining our position and trying to strengthen the likes of chemical and power plants,” says Mr. Ginola.

For nearly three decades SIMIC has fed its constant growth by means of continuous

SIMIC is a diversified company with a solid experience in engineering, manufacturing of critical process equipment, and assembly and maintenance of industrial plants

investments in new technologies, and dynamic and specialised personnel. Together with a tightly structured and flexible organisation, constituted at its true core value and strongly supporting the company, it aims to continue expanding and investing in the most innovative and advanced technology sectors. Linked to scientific research, power plants, and green energy, SIMIC is currently one of the major global players engaging in renewable power generation, with solar and wind plants fully owned, developed and built. SIMIC’s goal is to increase the portfolio of renewable energy production in the coming years. Actual and forecasted situation:

• Installed capacity 60 megawatts (MW)

• Capacity under construction

120 MW

• Capacity under development

250 MW

Power plant maintenance involves inspecting, maintaining, repairing and replacing equipment, machinery and other assets that support everyday operations. No matter how big or small, every single piece of equipment within a power plant plays a critical role in meeting daily goals and supporting overall operations.

Therefore, for SIMIC, equipment maintenance is a top priority for power plants, as failure of equipment can lead to devastating consequences ranging from decreased plant output to fullblown outages.

Strategic power plant maintenance requires a forward-thinking mindset. Power plants that strive for proactive maintenance should take actions in the

present moment that will ultimately lead to better results and performance in the future. SIMIC is focused on helping to cultivate this proactive mentality and has developed modern power plant maintenance tools to help achieve these goals.

Capitalising on intelligent digital solutions such as process analytics and asset lifecycle management tools can help power plants gain a deep insight into equipment performance and process efficiency. Plants can then analyse these insights to make changes that will ultimately benefit future production.

Solar, wind, nuclear, hydroelectric, coal and natural gas are all types of power plants which have the same goal: to produce electricity.

Regardless of power type, power plants depend on a wide variety of equipment to attain this goal. Optimising the use of equipment is key to maximising output in a cost-effective manner, resulting in decreased costs, increased revenue, and boosted productivity.

Power plant maintenance requires strategic thinking and undertaking measures to ensure long-lasting asset performance. SIMIC has developed and integrated predictive and preventive maintenance measures in a power plant maintenance strategy, which are able to improve plant efficiency and minimise equipment downtime for a streamlined performance.

as foreseen by the Italian government in the National Plan for Energy and Environment,” says Allegra.

Sustainability and the optimisation of performance are cornerstones of Tirreno Power’s approach to growth. Maintaining a position ahead of the curve, the company has identified and continues to exploit the benefits of CCGT plants as key enablers of the energy transition in guaranteeing a level of reliability.

Their use as a viable and reliable source of power rose to the fore in 2003, as Italy faced a major blackout lasting for several hours. Although originating from a fault in Switzerland, this highlighted the pressing need for an adequate energy system, leading to the opening up of the market to new areas of investment within thermal power generation capacity. Today, CCGT continues to fulfil both adequate supply and security.

“CCGT plants represent the balance

point in a system highly penetrated by intermittent renewables such as wind and solar power,” Allegra explains. Indeed, CCGT typically provides very flexible dispatching services to the grid with the highest economic efficiency, compared to other available technologies.

As echoed by Tirreno Power’s primary pillar of asset performance, these CCGT plants have been an area of focus for increasing flexibility and availability levels in order to respond to the growing needs of the system for dispatching services.

“We are achieving this through an intensive CapEx plan. This has required a much greater effort than what was originally foreseen in our industrial plan (exceeding over €100 million for the period 2015-2022), which has been ‘self-financed’ by the systematic action of OpEx reduction,” he details.

This investment into the

improvement of the CCGT plants has reduced the accident level well below the benchmark for that particular technology.

“This is a crucial result when we consider that the availability of production capacity is the service that is renumerated in the capacity market. This was launched in Italy in 2022 to improve the adequacy of our electric system,” adds Allegra.

THE ERA OF REINDUSTRIALISATION

Tirreno Power’s efforts in driving a sustainable future for Italy’s energy supply marry with its work in realising a community-centric circular economy.

Choosing to act as an agent of change, Tirreno Power didn’t simply close the coal power plant at Vado Ligure, but instead launched an ambitious reindustrialisation project, with the aim of attracting

“THIS YEAR MORE THAN EVER, OUR PRIORITIES CONTINUE TO BE FOCUSED ON THE PILLARS THAT HAVE ENSURED OUR GROWTH”

– FABRIZIO ALLEGRA, GENERAL MANAGER, TIRRENO

POWER

CCGT Power Plant in Civitavecchia 1200 MW (Torrevaldaliga Sud)

TIRRENO POWER IN NUMBERS

THREE – Thermoelectric sites located on the Tyrrhenian coast with four combined cycle plants fuelled by natural gas

18 – Hydroelectric plants located along the entire arc of the Ligurian Apennines

5,400 – GWh fed into the grid in 2022

20 – years of activity as one of the pioneers of the Italian electricity market

8TH – company in Italy for production capacity

228 – people working together as a team to achieve shared goals

companies from different sectors and continuing to support the community of Savona, which had relied heavily on the plant for the area’s economic livelihood. As a result, the former coal site has been entirely revamped for productive purposes and now stands as a success story that sets an industrial benchmark for exiting coal production.

“Our objective was to develop a great opportunity for the local community, considering that Savona province had been declared by the government as an “area of complex industrial crisis”, suffering from the shutdown of many productive sites and facing an increasing unemployment rate,” he informs us.

Research studies have since estimated that in the long-term, this new operation has the potential to generate between €1.9-4.4 billion in economic impact from new businesses, human capital

development, and new jobs, with a multiplicative effect on the economic system between seven to eight times compared to the initial investment.

“This programme has been considered one of the most successful cases of reindustrialisation in Italy in the framework of the circular economy,” Allegra shares proudly.

Control Room Torrevaldaliga Sud

Napoli Levante site

Elsewhere, Tirreno Power continues to improve and reinforce its relationships with local communities through recent exploration into the application of Renewable Energy Communities as a new and more efficient and integrated model of producing and consuming energy.

“We have experienced considerable interest from local institutions and businesses for these applications since the early stages of development,” says Allegra. “We are now waiting for the final regulations to be published in the coming weeks. We have reached the final development step in Vado Ligure, and are now working on this idea across all our major sites.”

Overall, the successful transformation of the Vado Ligure site can be seen as a microcosm that

is emblematic of the entire Tirreno Power operation.

NEW FRONTIERS

Looking ahead, Tirreno Power will continue to maintain and improve its assets as the backbone of the company’s future growth.

In the renewables field, this entails a continued focus on the performance of its hydroelectric power facilities as Tirreno Power’s flagship asset. Most recently, this has involved the restoration and renovation of three sites in Western Liguria, after significant damage during a storm in 2020.

Another key example of emerging from the wreckage and using adversity as a window to opportunity, this restoration has paved the way for new endeavours.

“During these works, we also built a

new power plant that uses wastewater from the power plant upstream, increasing the total energy produced in the site without any additional impacts to the environment,” shares Allegra, referring to the use of

CCGT Power Plant in Vado Ligure 800MW (Liguria)

Napoli Levante site

mini and micro hydros to enhance geodetic unused jumps as cuttingedge applications in the field.

“We are committed to developing new projects in this area.”

In furthering the provision of energy security for the country’s electricity system by energising Italy’s renewable future, Tirreno Power has its sights set on moving into the realm of storage projects, as a strategic improvement in terms of energy flow management. As its General Manager affirms, “storage plants represent one of the new frontiers for our sector and a promising prospect for the energy transition.”

Drawing to a close, Allegra returns

to the significance of this milestone in what has been a challenging, but ultimately rewarding journey for Tirreno Power, with a hopeful future ahead so long as the company follows its three guiding principles.

“This year more than ever, our priorities continue to be focused on the pillars that have ensured our growth,” he says.

“In terms of our assets, we are continuing to invest in the improvement of the performances of systems already in place and in new projects, with the aim of diversifying our portfolio of technologies and energy sources.

completing a process which, in previous years, has brought about an important generational turnover and a new focus on technical and managerial skills, with particularly close care for the cohesion of our team.

“And finally, our stakeholder relationships. As we celebrate our 20th birthday, we have a plan of initiatives that will allow us to reinforce the dialogue with all our stakeholders, to reflect on the path we have gone through jointly and on the future of energy that we are going to build together.”

Tel:

info@tirrenopower.com www.tirrenopower.com

– FABRIZIO ALLEGRA, GENERAL MANAGER, TIRRENO POWER

EME Outlook Issue 52 | 15