In a few days, Gianluca Altamura, 49, Neapolitan from Naples, captain, will moor the ship Leonardo da Vinci at the Prysmian pier in Arco Felice, in the bay of Pozzuoli, and will roll up the 120-kilometer-long electrical cable into two huge reels. Then, bow towards the North Sea, where the Leonardo da Vinci ship, the largest cable-laying in the world, will connect England with Denmark, the Viking Link, with 700 kilometers of submarine power line in very high voltage, to allow wind energy. produced on the high seas to flow to consumers.
Each ship has an unmistakable smell of a ship, a smell of salt, bilge, engine room, sweat. The Prysmian ship Leonardo da Vinci no, it has not yet acquired the smell of work. Completed last summer in the Norwegian shipyards Vard (Fincantieri) with an investment of nearly 180 million, the 171-meter-long ship suffered the viral effect of Covid, and only now could it be presented with a baptismal ceremony in Pozzuoli. . The hosts are the CEO of Prysmian, Valerio Battista, the mayor of Pozzuoli, Vincenzo Figliolìa, and the president of Campania, Vincenzo De Luca. But the real hosts are the three commanders who alternate every three months on the bridge, that is, in addition to the commander Altamura also Alfredo Amitrano, 44, Sorrento, and Alessandro Ubaldini, 44, a big man from Trieste.
Production and installation
The Prysmian group, which collects the legacy of Pirelli Cavi, is the largest producer in the world of high voltage cables, and is also very strong in optical fiber. For this reason it has a fleet of five naval vessels, from the colossal Leonardo da Vinci to the Giulio Verne cable-laying who had the previous world record, the Cable Enterprise up to Ulysses (for the depths of a few meters) and the Barbarossa cable-laying pontoon (for the lagoon slums). They make the cables and lay them.
Says Valerio Battista, Florentine from Figline: «Our investment plan sets in motion about one billion by 2024, mainly aimed at developing business in support of the energy transition. The development of the trans-European electricity grid plays a strategic role both for the decarbonisation and transition to renewable sources and for improving European energy autonomy, an urgency which has become topical with the Russia-Ukraine conflict ”.
2021 oversized
2021 was an extraordinary year for Prysmian, where the 12 billion turnover saw contracts for almost 5 of the 8 billion euros in the world market for high voltage cables but, excluding the chase of customers, in the “business as usual ”, the Milan-based Bicocca company has a share“ of about 35-40% in the market for submarine and terrestrial high voltage cables ”, specifies Battista.