Enel, here are the first moves of Cattaneo and Scaroni
Enel: Cattaneo's pirouette in the United States and Scaroni's stab at NATO. Facts and insights
Yesterday Enel North America, the US division of the Roman group, announced the site where the large photovoltaic cell and panel factory announced months ago will be built: in Tulsa Ports, a port area near the city of Tulsa, in the state of Oklahoma .
ALL ABOUT ENEL'S FACTORY IN THE UNITED STATES
The facility will require an investment of approximately $1 billion and will open in 2025; there will be made bifacial solar devices (more efficient than traditional ones), such as those of the Catania plant , for an initial production capacity of 3 gigawatts per year.
This is an important investment for the United States both from an employment point of view, given that we are talking about fifteen hundred new jobs, and from a supply chain perspective: the country wants to become a manufacturing powerhouse of technologies for the energy transition counter China's dominance of this industry, but currently does not produce solar cells (the devices that form panels ).
THE NEW CATTANEO LINE
The confirmation of the project itself is in a certain sense news, because the new CEO of Enel, Flavio Cattaneo, had criticized the investment in the United States : "It's an approach that I don't agree with", he declared to Il Foglio months ago when it had not been indicated to the government at the top of Enel, because "if you want to safeguard the national interest, you should produce in Italy and not elsewhere".
– Read also: All the challenges for Cattaneo at Enel
The factory, on the other hand, will be built, also because the North American market was considered the most interesting for Enel's international investors, but following a different process from that of Francesco Starace's administration. As Il Sole 24 Ore explains, the original plans envisaged that the majority of the capital in the project, once developed, would be sold to private individuals to reduce the weight of the investment: this is also the case with the Catania factory, whose 50 per cent will go to the investment company NextEnergy Capital. However, it seems that now Enel – according to the Confindustria newspaper – intends to sell to the market a larger share than originally planned for the Oklahoma plant, perhaps even 70-80 percent.
In short: the Cattaneo administration seems to want to maintain a presence abroad, but downsizing it to concentrate resources on Italy.
SCARONI'S WORDS ABOUT RUSSIA
In an interview with Repubblica , Enel's president Paolo Scaroni ( here all the details on the new board of directors) tried to distance himself from the image of a friend of Russia during his period as CEO of Eni, from 2005 to 2014 .
"If you want to know if I was a friend of Putin, I'll answer no," he told the Repubblica journalist. “Nor Miller's either,” i.e. Alexey Miller, CEO of the Russian state gas company Gazprom. “They were trading partners of Italy as they were of all major European countries. I thought they were reliable suppliers, as did Angela Merkel and the Austrian chancellor”.
Consequently, Scaroni defended the renewal of the supply contracts between Eni and Gazprom, which over time have led Italy to develop a heavy dependence on Russia for natural gas, with a 40 percent share of total imports. "Russia has been selling gas to Europe, and to Italy, since the 1960s," he said. "I approved it [the renewal of the contract, ed ], because it was in Eni's interest and because the Italian government shared it", that is, with all those who followed one another during his tenure at Eni: they were guided by Silvio Berlusconi, Romano Prodi, Mario Monti and Enrico Letta.
In 2008 Russia attacked Georgia, causing it to lose portions of its territory; then in 2014 he illegally invaded and annexed the Crimea peninsula, taking it from Ukraine.
Does Scaroni tease NATO?
When asked how the first hydrocarbon deals with Russia were born, Scaroni talks about Enrico Mattei, the founder of Eni, who "in the 1950s, in the midst of the Cold War, signed the first contract for the purchase of Russian oil . In the 1960s, the first projects to export Russian gas to Europe began. It was possible”, adds the president of Enel, “because there was the approval of NATO”.
He also said that NATO member Norway has benefited from rising gas prices in Europe, of which it has become a very important supplier following the break from Russia.
As for the United States, which is in fact the main member of the Atlantic alliance, Scaroni recounts that “I kept them informed of the operations we were carrying out in politically sensitive areas. Every two months we went to Washington […]. The sensitive issue in those years was not Russia, but Iran”. After the imposition of US sanctions on Tehran for its nuclear program in 2006, “the United States invites us to break off relations with Tehran. We interrupt them but let them know that we have to recover three billion dollars for the investments made in the country".
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/energia/enel-mosse-dichiarazioni-cattaneo-scaroni/ on Tue, 23 May 2023 08:35:31 +0000.