Resolute commitment to innovation
THROUGHOUT its more than 80-year history, ERG has always focused on driving success through responsible innovation and change. This focus helped to enable the company’s successful transition, over the last ten years, from an oil and gas focused operation to becoming one of Europe’s leading renewable energy companies.
Today the company is a leading independent operator in the renewable electricity generation market. This process of continuous innovation is particularly important in this market, where new technologies are a constant theme.
Decarbonisation, innovation and internationalisation are the three principles that ERG’S business model is focused on to drive growth over the coming years. ERG is backing this process with an investment programme of around €1.7 billion. The aim is to accelerate the world’s transition away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy sources.
One instance of ERG’S approach to innovation is the way the company has undertaken a major project to ‘repower’ some of its earliest wind farms.
‘Repowering’ is an process of dismantling old wind turbines to remove less efficient technology, and replacing these with a significantly smaller number of turbines of greater size and power, with greater efficiency.
New land is not required for this process, something which is required for greenfield developments.
The number of installed wind turbines is reduced by more than half, which reduces visual clutter.
If repowering was to be undertaken on all the installed Italian wind power on sites where this was achievable, CO2 emissions would be 25 million tonnes lower than at present.
According to the National Energy and Climate Plan (NECP) – presented by the Italian Government to the European Commission the exploitation of the potential of wind repowering is fundamental for the achievement of the 2030 objectives.