Italy's power giant Enel had to shut every nuclear plant after one vote
Enel's Caorso reactor, Italy's first major nuclear power station, went quiet in 1986 for routine refuelling. It never restarted. After the Chernobyl disaster, Italians voted against nuclear power in a 1987 referendum, and the state utility had to close or halt every nuclear project it had. Caorso was formally shut in 1990.
Enel itself was born of a political decision. Italy's electricity had been produced mostly by regional private companies exploiting local rivers and mountains. In 1962 the government, looking to France and Britain, created a national electricity board to take over nearly every producer and distributor, sparing only firms that mainly made power for their own factories and very small operators. Former owners were compensated over ten years at 5.5 percent interest, and 1963 became Enel's first working year.
The early years were about wiring the country together. A national dispatch centre in Rome began balancing supply and demand in real time in 1963, and settlements without electricity fell from 1.27 percent to 0.46 percent within four years, connecting more than 320,000 people. Undersea cables reached Elba, Ischia and Sardinia, and high-voltage links joined the grid to France and Switzerland. In 1963 Enel also inherited responsibility for the Vajont dam, where a landslide into the reservoir killed about two thousand people; Enel and Montedison were later held responsible and paid damages.
The 1973 oil shock pushed Enel to diversify into hydro, geothermal, coal and nuclear, cutting oil's share of its fuel from 75.3 percent in 1973 to 58.5 percent by 1985. It experimented too: in 1981 it built Eurelios in Sicily, the first large-scale concentrated solar plant using compact linear Fresnel reflectors, and in 1984 opened Italy's first wind farm, in Sardinia. It posted its first profit in 1986.
Liberalisation came in the 1990s. Enel became a joint-stock company in 1992 and was split into production, distribution and transmission businesses in 1999, when it was privatised. The state remains its largest shareholder, and it is now the world's second-largest power company by revenue.
Source: Enel
