TCVVV AG: Clean heat for Santa Caterina (Italy)

There are plenty of winter sports enthusiasts who count Santa Caterina as their favourite resort. Santa Caterina has also hosted more than its share of exciting world-cup skiing. Cold temperatures may be welcomed out on the piste, but whether you’re a casual weekend skier or a top international athlete, you’ll still want to be snug and warm once you’re back indoors: This represents a challenging task for TCVVV AG and its district heating plant in Santa Caterina Valfurva.

The company TCVVV AG was founded in 1997 to produce and distribute clean energy from biomass, and use it for heating and electricity generation. This company builds production facilities, and designs and constructs district heating plants and electricity stations.

Managing director Walter Righini: “Our primary objective is to use and add value to local resources; by using renewable energy sources we aim to reduce our dependence on energy from external sources. The municipality of Santa Caterina Valfurva is not connected to the methane gas network, but it does have access to renewable energy sources, in particular wood. This is the main pre-requisite for building a district heating plant fuelled with biomass.”

The district heating plant uses mainly waste products from wood processing, tree surgery and afforestation. Weekly deliveries from local sawmills and other local suppliers guarantee the plant’s supply of renewable energy sources. To protect the environment, the waste gases produced in the combustion process are constantly monitored. The amount of CO2 produced when the plant is in operation is exactly the same as the amount of CO2 absorbed by the trees during their life cycle; this is why the district heating plant can justifiably claim to operate on a CO2-neutral basis.

For control and data acquisition in its district heating plant, TCVVV AG was keen to go specifically with PC-based technology and an Ethernet network. For safety reasons, redundancy was to be built into the PC network. In the words of the engineer Fabio Pola, who held overall responsibility for all the hardware and software: “We were particularly keen to avoid as far as possible working with conventional PLCs, because redundant hard PLCs are difficult to find and also costly. We were looking for modern, open technology that would allow us to work in a flexible way whilst at the same time reducing our costs.”

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SS_TCVVV_e_LoRes.pdf