Dalmine, 11 September 2024 - Bergamo has taken another important step towards decarbonization. Thanks to the agreement for the recovery of heat generated by the Rea Dalmine WtE plant, A2A has been able to expand the city’s district heating network without having to utilise fossil fuels. As of next autumn, A2A Heat and Services will, in fact, be able to bring clean heat to the city, heating as many as 11,000 apartments more, thanks to the heat waste from the Rea Dalmine plant. The project, started in 2019, with the signing of an agreement between the two companies, has been completed and was presented today in Dalmine by the chairman of Rea Dalmine, Marco Sperandio, and by A2A’s managing director, Renato Mazzoncini, in the presence of the Lombardy region’s Environment and Climate counsellor, Giorgio Maione, the mayor of Bergamo, Elena Carnevali, the mayor of Dalmine, Francesco Bramani, and the counsellor delegated by the Province of Bergamo, Gianfranco Masper.
"Completion of this project represents a strategic achievement of great importance for the Greenthesis Group and for the entire area. The recovery of heat from our WtE plant is a concrete demonstration of how technological innovation and sustainability can converge to generate value, reduce the wastage of resources and promote a more efficient management of energy – explained Rea Dalmine chairman Marco Sperandio. This achievement not only contributes to increasing the energy resilience of the city of Bergamo but also greatly benefits the environment: thanks to the recovery of heat, we avoid the release into the atmosphere of around 15,000 tonnes of CO2 a year. Our efforts, made possible through solid collaboration with A2A, demonstrate our ability to actively respond with concrete solutions to the challenges posed for us in these times, contributing significantly to the objectives of decarbonization. This project is thus a fine example of how industry can be a driving force in the ecological transition. We strongly believe that such initiatives are essential for a sustainable future and we are proud of being able to make such a significant contribution, confirming the Greenthesis Group’s role as a leading national operator in the field of environmental management and the recovery of resources.”
“In the recent study that we prepared with Ambrosetti, ‘Urban sustainability. Decarbonization, electrification and innovation: opportunities and solutions for future-fit cities’, it clearly emerged how district heating is one of the most efficient tools in the decarbonization of towns and cities – noted A2A managing director Renato Mazzoncini. New-generation district heating which does not use fossil fuels but thermal waste. The recovery of heat is, in fact, one of the mainstays of the sustainable development that A2A is pursuing in all of its operations. Through our work, we want to see district heating making more and more use of heat waste from large industrial production facilities and WtE plants, but also from steelworks and data centres, so as to be able to heat and cool homes without producing any more CO2. With the connection to Rea Dalmine, Bergamo will be able to expand its network thanks to clean heat: an important contribution in meeting the challenge of the Climate City Contract and achieving climatic neutrality as soon as 2030.”
The project foresees three levels of intervention: the creation of the cogeneration section at the Dalmine WtE site so that the plant can produce not only electricity but also heat for the district heating network; the laying of a 5.6 km pipeline to take the heat from Dalmine to Bergamo and, from there, to the parts of the city reached by the network; the upgrading of the pumping station at the A2A facility in Via Voltara, in the city, where there is also a new heat storage unit, a large tank able to store 5,000 cubic metres of hot water so as to be able to optimise management of the heat arriving from Rea and its distribution across the city. The result is an increase of about 50% in the amount of heat available for Bergamo’s district heating, which means an increase in five years of 2.6 million cubic metres of building volume heated.
Every year, the Rea Dalmine WtE plant, the Greenthesis Group’s model facility, handles 150,000 tonnes of waste. With the new cogeneration set-up comprising a new turbine and a heat exchanger, for the same amount of waste treated, in addition to producing 95,000 MWh of electricity a year, the plant will recover 90,000 thermal MWh of heat, much of which is currently dispersed into the atmosphere. In this way, the energy conversion yield of the plant will increase from 27% to over 80%.
The 5.6 km connection taking Rea heat to Via Goltara in Bergamo crosses the towns of Dalmine, Lallio before reaching the city, and involved the laying of a dual pipeline. This particular aspect of the project – which allowed the extension of the coverage and capacity of the district heating network and an increase in the number of users that could be connected – was able to benefit from 3.8 million euros in funding under the terms of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan.
After the signing of the agreement in 2019 and the technical time necessary for authorizations, the pipeline laying work for the new network began in 2022 and was completed in the last few weeks. Overall, the project involved an investment of around 30 million euros, of which more than 20 million for the creation of the connection with the district heating network and for work at A2A Heat and Services’ Goltara facility (storage and pumping system); and about 9.5 million for the creation of Rea Dalmine’s new cogeneration section.
Today, Bergamo’s district heating system extends over 87 kilometres, heats the equivalent of about 37,000 apartments avoiding emission into the atmosphere of 20,000 tonnes of CO2. With the heat recovered from Rea Dalmine, it will be possible to serve other parts of the city, including the Colognola, Malpensata and San Tomaso districts, the new ChorusLife area as well as the stadium area, including the Gewiss Stadium itself. In five years, A2A Heat and Services expect to extend the network by another 22 kilometres, with environmental and economic benefits for families. Thanks to the recovery of heat from Rea Dalmine, 11,000 boilers will be turned off, eliminating the same amount of CO2 that would be eliminated by 25,000 photovoltaic panels. The new district heating extension will make it possible to decrease emissions of carbon dioxide by about 15,000 tonnes a year.
For all of these reasons, the A2A-Rea Dalmine project was included in Bergamo’s Climate City Contract. The provincial capital is, in fact, one of the 100 European cities (nine of which Italian) which signed up to the European Commission mission to achieve climatic neutrality by 2030. A fundamental contribution to the nation’s decarbonisation considering the fact that cities occupy 3% of the planet’s surface but are responsible for more than 70% of CO2 emissions. The recent A2A-Ambrosetti study estimates that, in 2050, residents in Italy's regional and provincial capitals well exceed 80% of the country’s population. According to data from ISPRA (Italy’s environmental protection and research institute), the heating of buildings accounts for almost 18% of carbon dioxide emissions. In this scenario, new-generation district heating able to recover heat from non-fossil sources (WtE plants, data centres, industrial heat waste) stands as a choice for environmental sustainability: thanks to this technology, thousands of gas-fuelled boilers can be turned off and high-efficiency heat can be used. As is happening in Bergamo!
Contacts
REA
Anna Madaschi, Communications Office
anna.madaschi@greenthesisgroup.com
Tel. [+39] 347 2662026
A2A
Giuseppe Mariano, Head of Media Relations, Social Networking and Web
Davide Bacca, Press office
ufficiostampa@a2a.it
Tel. [+39] 3491860404