”We are expecting proposals from all over the world, even from large institutional investors, because it is a site of over 200 hectares near Rome and close to the sea, which lends itself to many initiatives. You will probably have to put various ideas together”, but giants such as Google, Apple or Microsoft could use it as the location for a data center. As Charles Drums, Director of Enel Italy, presented the new public tender for the redevelopment of the industrial site of the power station of Montalto di Castro, in the province of Viterbo.
Expressions of interest can be sent from 24 May, under conditions that will be published on the platform on the same day www.futur-e.enel.it. The projects, together with the technical attachments and the binding purchase proposals, must arrive by 3 October 2016.
The initiative was illustrated today at the information center of the plant, also in the presence of Sergio Caci, mayor of Montalto di Castro, Mauro Buschini, councilor for the environment of the Lazio Region, Mauro Mazzola, president of the Province of Viterbo, and Maurizio Stirpe, president of Unindustria Lazio.
”The evaluation phase of the proposals will be a long and shared process – continued Tamburi -, after the October deadline it will take at least two months to complete the selection. In addition to Enel, technicians from the Milan Polytechnic and representatives of local institutions will also participate in the commission. The awarding phase will start at least one year from now".
The call is part of the project Futur-E, which - without cutting jobs - aims at enhance the facilities less efficient, some of which have not produced for several years already. In Italy there are 21 Enel sites undergoing this transformation. The largest is precisely that of Montalto di Castro, which hosts a plant that has now been stopped since 2012, but capable in the past of covering up to 5-6 percent of the national requirement.
The plant also has "a particular significance from a political and industrial point of view", Tamburi underlined. The Montalto plant was originally intended for nuclear power, but following the Chernobyl disaster and the subsequent referendum in November 1986, the works were interrupted. Three years later the construction of a conventional thermoelectric plant was approved, which came to have four oil/gas groups and eight gas turbines, becoming the first in Italy in terms of installed power with its 3.600 MW.
Montalto di Castro also hosts a 6 MW Enel photovoltaic plant, with an extension of just under 10 hectares and a production capacity of over 7 million kilowatt hours a year, equal to the needs of 2.700 families.
