“Planners never stop. So we guarantee that work gets done on the lines"

In these times of quarantine, so many things have had to be postponed, but transmission grid maintenance is not one of them. And when power lines need to be shut down to enable workers to do their work, that’s when Marco Spina, head of one of Terna's planning teams, comes into play. A 34-year-old electrical engineer, Marco is originally from Molise, but works in Arcole, in the province of Verona, where the Dugale Plant Unit is located. In addition to the Verona area, he is also partly responsible for the provinces of Vicenza and Trento. “We already receive a lot of requests in normal conditions because these are very densely populated territories,” Marco explains. “Now, it’s all amplified even further by the coronavirus emergency, which has hit this country particularly violently”.

In Italy, Terna manages the operation and works on the electricity grid through three territorial departments: North-east (the one where Marco works, which includes Trentino Alto Adige, Veneto, Friuli, Emilia Romagna and Tuscany), North-west (Lombardy, Piedmont, Liguria and Sardinia) and Centre-south (the rest of Italy). In turn, the departments are divided into various plant units, each catering for a portion of the grid, from ordinary operation to maintenance, renewal and development.

Marco is responsible for the Planning team within one of these Plant Units: “One main activity is managing unavailability. For example, when we need to shut down a high voltage power line to carry out some work on a plant, we receive the request and send it to Dispatching, which then deactivates the power line. We also draft and plan the budget for our unit, managing all the costs of the interventions to be carried out on the grid over the course of the year: materials, external entities and internal resources”.

But that’s not all. Marco also has a particularly delicate responsibility, namely distributing ‘Personal Protective Equipment’ (PPE). “With the current pandemic, in addition to normal PPE worn by our personnel, personnel also receive masks. We use surgical masks for small-scale movements across the territory, but for activities which make it impossible to maintain a minimum distance of one meter (for example the important tasks where personnel need an elevating work platform) we provide FFP2 or FFP3 masks”.

Marco alternates between a week at home and a week at the office in order to deliver the PPE. “I can do this because, at the moment, there is hardly anyone around in the locations where I work, so I don't run the risk of infection,” he explains. “However, the rest of my team, which involves four other people, has been smartworking constantly since 18th March”.

Marco does not hide the fact that, in the early days, there were various difficulties, first and foremost in terms of space. “At home, none of us have rooms comparable to the office, so we have to adapt to work in much closer quarters. And then it can be the case that the internet slows down or is interrupted for a few minutes due to the overload. But it’s nothing we can’t deal with. It's just a matter of getting used to it. Despite all this, everyone continues to do their work with the same level of performance as always”.

In terms of operating personnel, those who actually work on the grid, “to avoid contagion, the company has decided that only half of them will be in service over this period”, Marco explains. “The other 50%, who remain on call at home, will have a series of online training activities available from Terna via its Campus”. Obviously, since there must be fewer staff at work for safety reasons, activities are continuing, but at a slower pace than normal during recent weeks. Terna has decided to postpone the start of some construction sites in order to concentrate on activities that are strictly necessary. The aim is to protect the Group's personnel, but also personnel from external entities which collaborate with Terna on electricity grid works.

Coronavirus has forced everyone to modify the way they work, but emergency management can help develop new skills. “Due to the pandemic, several activities have been postponed, and the work of rescheduling has therefore become more intense than ever,” Marco concludes. “All this is teaching me how to organise a large amount of work from a distance... I have never had so many conference calls as in recent weeks”.