Italgas inaugurates the new Plant and Network Command and Control Center in Florence

Florence, 3 October 2024 - Italgas today inaugurated the new Plant and Network Command and Control Center in Florence, an infrastructure based on a complex technological architecture that allows for the remote monitoring and management of the 74,000 kilometres of the Group's gas distribution network, including the 8,000 kilometres of Toscana Energia networks.

The new Center, built in the building spaces of the associate Toscana Energia, operates in symbiosis with its “twin” in Turin and makes it possible to increase the availability of resources to remotely intervene on the network and plants, intensify monitoring activities, collect and analyse operating data, and refine predictive maintenance programs. Overall, the new Center will further increase the levels of security, service flexibility and timeliness of intervention - direct and remotely - 24 hours a day, every day of the year.

Present at the ribbon-cutting ceremony, together with Italgas CEO Paolo Gallo, were the Mayor of Florence, Sara Funaro, the President of the Region Eugenio Giani, the President of Toscana Energia Fabio Giorgetti, and the CEO of Toscana Energia, Bruno Burigana.

“With the ribbon-cutting ceremony of the new Command and Control Center in Florence, we are taking a big step forward in the technological innovation of the gas distribution service - said Mayor Sara Funaro -. Remote monitoring and control will make it possible to put in place a service that is certainly increasingly efficient for citizens, allowing them to have a precise picture of how the network is working, but at the same time also sustainable: the use of the most advanced technologies, in fact, is also decisive in environmental terms.Today we are reaching an important goal that puts our city even more in the vanguard”.

“Thanks to the new Control and Command Center for plants and networks - commented the President of the Tuscany Region, Eugenio Giani - Florence and Tuscany will become the heart, or more precisely the brain, of a digitalized national gas distribution network. The joint operation with the similar Center in Turin will bring significant innovation to the governance of this sector, better efficiency monitoring, and increased safety. The technological upgrades open up possibilities that were unthinkable just a few decades ago, enabling a more targeted service and increasingly comprehensive control of the network—improvements that benefit all of us and the environment.”

“The continuous pursuit of innovation - declared Paolo Gallo, Italgas CEO - has allowed Italgas and its subsidiaries to be recognised as industry benchmarks. The technological upgrade has triggered a Copernican revolution that has completely transformed our networks to the point of making them one of the driving forces behind the ecological transition to net zero and the sustainable development of our cities. With the new Center in Florence, we are also cutting another important milestone: we are getting closer and closer to the goal of a fully digitalised network, able to act like the nervous system of the human body, with the capacity to react at central and local level”.

The Piazza Mattei Center is located within an environment specially designed for the management of a state-of-the-art digital network.

The structure consists of two contiguous areas that operate in close connection: in one, the reports that reach the Emergency Service toll-free number converge - from the receipt of the request - to the indications to be put into practice immediately, to the service order to the technicians in the area for their direct intervention - in the other, the remote command and control takes place through the use of the proprietary software DANA (Digital Advanced Network Automation) which allows to act on sensors and actuators installed along the network. The environments are organised to facilitate sharing and collaboration on common topics as well as concentration on specific topics.

DANA is the proprietary application created in the Group's Digital Factory and represents the heart of the technologies employed as it enables remote control and management, raising the efficiency levels of activities. In particular, the integrated mapping system makes it possible to intervene on the network, “interrogate” it and verify its status even in its individual segments, thus favouring an increasingly in-depth and comprehensive knowledge of the individual distribution systems.