A2a against everyone: the battle for the Trezzo waste-to-energy plant is worth a billion

Even a small election can have very high stakes. On June 9 Trezzo on the Addaa metropolitan city of Milan with twelve thousand inhabitants, has just turned left after a long period of Lega Nord domination. It won Diego Torri39 years old, director of the Mirabello shopping center in Cantù, thanks to the split between his opponents and former mayors Silvana Carmen Centurelli, supported by the national center-right trio, and Danilo Villa, who returned to the sword of Alberto da Giussano but without the writing “Salvini premier”. The sum of the votes between Centurelli and Villa exceeded 54 percent.

While Torri prepares the new council, which will take office on June 26, on Wednesday June 19 the Regional Administrative Court of Lombardy will decide on a legal battle that is worth about one billion euros in turnover. To be precise, 864.8 million plus VAT. It is the twenty-year concession for the waste-to-energy plant in Trezzo, contested between the outgoing operator Prima and A2a Ambiente, which the Centurelli administration had designated to take over from Prima with an emergency provision issued at the beginning of May, a month before the municipal elections.

The order was not carried out both because there was a concrete risk of interrupting the service and because at the end of April the State Council had arranged for a technical consultancy, which is still being defined, on the conditions of the new assignment. In essence, it is a question of establishing whether the outgoing manager, a special purpose company controlled by Renantis (ex Falck renewables) together with a Luxembourg-based company from the Coventa group, based in New Jersey, had the opportunity to assert its pre-emption right after having matched the conditions of the Brescia-Milan multi-utility. Prima, which is 2 percent owned by the same Lombardy municipality, also raised the issue of A2a’s dominant position and the lack of a profit-sharing clause in the new agreement. In other words, outside of the concession fee, the operator will not share any extra profits from the activity with the municipality.

A2awhich has been associated with Thermochemical and put it on the table investments for 137 million euros In addition to VAT, it promises to increase the plant’s capacity to 170,000 tons of waste per year and to create a district heating network for public and private buildings with the energy produced by the plant, reducing fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

The battle of Trezzo can serve as a parameter for other economic activities in concession that are creating problems for the government, such as the exploitation of beaches. Even for the beach operators, who manage state-owned beaches in violation of the Bolkestein directive, the game increasingly passes through cases in administrative courts. The successive waves of appeals, first-degree suspensions, verdicts on the merits and second-degree judgments are becoming increasingly central in a context where, instead of playing the game of revenue, most of the time is spent looking at the VAR screen.

The waste-to-energy plant in Trezzo is an example of this situation. The clash between Prima and A2a, announced as early as 2021, had an indisputable effect on the decline in performance of the Milanese plant put into operation in 2003, five years after the entry into service of the waste-to-energy plant in Brescia, the largest of the group led by Renato Mazzoncini.

Already in 2022, disposal forecasts have dropped from 151 thousand tons of waste for 111 thousand megawatts to actual numbers equal to just under 130 thousand tons for 90 thousand MW. The surge in energy prices due to the Russian invasion in February 2022 has kept the net profits (6.9 million euros). But in 2023, the year the concession expired, the megawatts decreased to 73,450 for 117 thousand tons disposed of. In the first four months of 2024 there was a collapse to less than 20 thousand MW for 28 thousand tons. The projection of these data for the year suggests an overall reduction of the cycle of one third. Another consequence of the uncertainty on the duration of the concessionas happens with highways or hydroelectric power plants, is that a manager at the crossroads between decline and renewal is unlikely to be inclined to spend a fortune on maintenance.

Prima’s own accounting documents warn of problems related to the condenser, the excessively hot summer and the shutdowns of the incineration plants, not to mention a backfire with intervention by the fire brigade without harm to people. Even the days of non-exploitation of the plant, inferred from the zero emissions, would have gone from 50 days in 2021 to 99 days last year.

“We will evaluate based on the TAR ruling,” says the newly elected mayor Torri, “and the verdict of the Council of State that should arrive in July. We inherit a situation carried forward by previous administrations and this complicates things a bit. Our concerns are linked to the approximately 3 million euros per year that arrive in the municipal coffers from the waste-to-energy plant and the employees, about forty, which will be reabsorbed thanks to the social clause”. But more time will pass. Whatever decision the TAR takes, the loser will appeal to the Council of State.