POWER September 2016 - 32

TOP PLANTS
Chivasso Combined Cycle Power
Plant, Turin, Italy
Owner/operator: A2A
Courtesy: A2A/GE
When a plant goes into mothballs-especially because of poor economics-it's often
a harbinger of impending retirement. Upgrades to improve performance may
help, but in changing markets, returns can be highly uncertain. Italian energy firm
A2A partnered with GE to return one plant to profitability with a combination of
hardware improvements and cloud-based analytics.
Thomas W. Overton, JD
I
t's not often that POWER gives an award
to a plant that had to shut down because
it became uneconomic. But that's exactly
what we're doing with this one.
Like many areas elsewhere in Europe, the
power market in northern Italy has undergone
enormous changes over the past few decades.
Nationalized after World War II, the Italian
power sector operated as state-run monopoly
ENEL (an Italian acronym for National Entity
for Electricity and later just Enel) for
nearly 40 years. The original Chivasso power
plant was built as a coal- and fuel oil-fired facility
in the early 1950s. For several decades,
it supported the rapidly growing industrial
base-particularly Italy's automotive sector-in
the area as Turin became one of the
economic engines of the nation in the postwar
period.
32
Near the turn of the millennium, Enel
began looking at upgrading the aging plant,
replacing the thermal boilers with a modern
three-unit combined cycle plant (which also
incorporated district heating). Construction
began in 2002, and the new plant between
the left bank of the River Po and the entrance
of the Cavour Canal came online two
years later.
But the winds of deregulation were already
blowing through the European Union
(EU) and Italy itself. Following several EU
directives in the 1990s, Italy in 1999 laid
out a path to liberalize the national power
market. Enel had been converted to a stateowned
joint-stock company in 1992, but the
new directive began the process of breaking
the monopoly and selling off many of Enel's
assets. One of those was Chivasso, which
www.powermag.com
Enel sold to competitor Edipower in 2002.
(A2A acquired Edipower's generation assets
in 2013.)
By then, however, the once-modern plant
found itself in a vastly changed market. Enormous
growth in renewable generation and
a high-voltage line importing power from
France brought new, challenging competition.
Chivasso, designed for baseload generation,
was unable to ramp quickly enough
to operate in the new market. Newer, more
flexible plants were taking market
share.
Chivasso was losing money, and there was
no guarantee that upgrades would make any
difference.
In December 2013, Edipower announced
that it was putting Chivasso into mothballs at
least through 2014-and perhaps indefinitely.
The plant's 50 workers and the customers
POWER | September 2016

http://www.powermag.com

POWER September 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of POWER September 2016

Contents
POWER September 2016 - Cover1
POWER September 2016 - Cover2
POWER September 2016 - Contents
POWER September 2016 - 2
POWER September 2016 - 3
POWER September 2016 - 4
POWER September 2016 - 5
POWER September 2016 - 6
POWER September 2016 - 7
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POWER September 2016 - Cover3
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