Enel is preparing to start with the fiber optic plan. Now that the Authority has given the green light to the installation of the new second generation meters, it could be the next Board of Directors, set for March 22 to approve the 2015 budget, to kick off the project which aims to accelerated a new fiber optic infrastructure for the country. This is the most concrete hypothesis that the managing director of the Enel group, Francesco Starace, is working on. The traveling companions will be Vodafone and Wind whose boards of directors could follow that of the electricity group to give a definitive concreteness to the project.
“We don't make the plan alone,” Starace said shortly before receiving the “Energy Man of the Year” award given to him by the Staffetta Quotidiana. The manager also specified that he will start from areas A and B (those with the greatest competition) while waiting for the government to define the tenders for the market failure areas (C and D). And if it is "possible" that Enel's board of directors will start the game in March, it is equally "possible" that the boards of Vodafone and Wind will follow up and examine the matter. Even if there is nothing in writing so far, it is true that contacts are underway between the groups, that there are synergies and that Enel's project is national in scope. All qualities being considered by Vodafone and Wind which, however, still have the letter of intent with Metroweb on the table until the end of the month. Telecom Italia, on the other hand, has so far held a more wavering position, oscillating between the opening of negotiations and the will to go it alone.
The situation, in market failure areas, is still at a standstill and in this uncertainty Enel can play a role, reopening the game on a national scale with competitive costs and finally getting the fiber plan off the ground - now that there's the green light of the Authority on the installation of the new meters. Certainly the meter replacement plan will start as planned, with an investment of 2,5 billion in 2016. “Certainly – added Starace – if we bring the plan to the Board of Directors it is because we shared it. As early as May – he continued – Enel will begin laying fiber optic cables in areas A and B. Discussions are open with all operators”. Starace also clarified the issue of synergies: “There are no synergies regarding the replacement costs of the new meters that work independently of the fibre. Instead, it is the fiber that takes advantage of the laying of the cables, which is possible when the meters are replaced”. Enel, he added, "can install broadband in the horizon not of 100 but of 1.000 Mega, with a practically unlimited capacity and conditioned only by the upstream and downstream installations", ie by the technology present in telephone exchanges and homes.
Starace then specified that investments and returns for the group linked to optical fiber are not comparable to the group's total: "The returns are interesting but on different orders of magnitude compared to the group's EBITDA" which hovers around 15 billion. What interests Enel, however, is "opening a new frontier of infrastructural life in our business: we do it in Italy but we will also replicate it abroad" for example in Spain and Latin America where there are plans to replace the meters. Hence the starting whistle on cabling in May, "not alone but with other telephone operators".
Meanwhile, Enel Green Power, in a consortium with Nareva, Siemens and Wind Power, has won a 1,22 billion dollar tender for the construction of wind farms in Morocco.
The total installed capacity amounts to 850 megaWatts, explains in a note Nareva, an energy group controlled by Société Nationale d'Investissement (Sni), the holding company headed by the Moroccan royal family.
