Florence is recharging. At the end of July, in Palazzo Vecchio, we signed an agreement to make the capital of the Renaissance - and Italy’s leading city according to Euromobility - a model for Italian smart cities.
Three months on, Enel CEO and General Manager Francesco Starace, together with Director of the Global e-Solutions Division Francesco Venturini, carried out a road test in person that confirmed that the smart city is already a reality.
How? On board two electric cars (a Renault Zoe and a Nissan Leaf) that Starace and Venturini drove from the station in Santa Maria Novella to Viale Guidoni, where they inaugurated a recharging column, and then to Palazzo Vecchio. The recharging point was an Enel Fast Recharge Plus, installed a few days ago that enables drivers to fill up with energy in 20 minutes. All of this is part of the European Project Eva+, coordinated by our Group and co-financed by the European Union through the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF), which involves the leading automobile producers that are investing in electric mobility. Between Milan and Rome there are now thirty recharging points, one every 60 kilometres, enabling electric vehicles to travel between the two cities without difficulty also because the columns are located close to motorway access points and exits, such as that in Viale Guidoni in Florence.
“With the creation of the infrastructure we are supporting the technological change in electric mobility,” explained Starace shortly afterwards, as a guest at the Italian newspaper Il Foglio’s Festa dell’ottimismo (Festival of optimism) held in Palazzo Vecchio. In the enchanting setting of the rooms that date back to the 1500s, the CEO illustrated Enel’s three lines of intervention when it comes to infrastructure. The national plan for electric mobility, which establishes the installation of between seven and twelve thousand columns over the next three years, the second-generation digital counter Open Meter and the plan for ultra-broadband to bring fast internet via fibre optic cable all over Italy. Starace pointed out that these interventions share common features, such as a capillary and horizontal distribution and the exchange of information between different points.
