Passion for clean energy
More than 160 years experience in the use of biomass
The production of vegetable extracts has always required large amounts of thermal and electrical energy.
All the plants of the Group - San Michele Mondovì (Piedmont, Italy), Bagni di Lucca (Tuscany, Italy) and La Escondida (Argentina) - have their own thermoelectric power plants for the production of steam and part of the electricity necessary for the industrial processes. In the beginning, they were powered with fossil fuels (1962) and later with the biomass resulting from the tannin extractions (1975).
In the 1990s, with the publication of the Directive on Electricity Production from Renewable Energy Sources, the strong synergy became evident. The synergy was between Silvateam’s main activity which is wood processing, the subsequent availability of biomasses and the internal knowledge for the production of thermal and electrical energy.
With the increase in oil prices, the energy costs reached high increasing percentages of Silvateam’s budget. There was, therefore, a need to optimize the energy costs by using alternative sources and taking advantage of the government incentives. This process generated the need to create a specialized team of technicians within the Group, in order to supervise the power stations’ activities in the manufacturing plants. This supervision allowed Silvateam to schedule their maintenance and to replace obsolete equipment when needed.
The team resulting from these energy projects in the Group was then turned into a legal entity operating under the corporate name of Silvateam Energia Srl. The company not only worked on specific projects inside the organization but it also took advantage of the opportunities that the EU regulations made available for renewable energy producers.