Sustainability

Our responsibility

We were born in the Aosta Valley but our commitment to environmental sustainability has roots all over Italy.

We are the energy of the future: clean, renewable, sustainable. Since 2019 we have been putting our commitment down in black and white by means of our Sustainability Report, a public and transparent tool drafted according to the international GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) standards, Core option. Here we illustrate the goals and results already achieved by the CVA Group, and lay the foundations for ambitious new objectives that respect the region and the environment.
Every day we work to construct a company that is increasingly strong and competitive from an economic, environmental and social perspective, conscious of the fact that we need to keep improving our performance levels, introducing innovations to our activities and fully embracing the goals of national and European energy policies. For us, this means maximising the performance of our plants but also planning major and strategic modernisation and upgrading works.

Protecting and caring for our region is part of our DNA. Our roots are in the Aosta Valley, a precious land whose riches lie not only in its natural heritage, but also in the skills and motivation of the people who live there and work with us every day.

Faced with an increasingly complex and interconnected world, we want to start here, in our Region, gradually broadening our horizons to develop sustainable models of energy production and consumption, to rethink economic activities, mobility and tourism with the aim of safeguarding and promoting the natural resources available to us today in order to protect the future generations. Our land will thus become a laboratory in which to experiment with a potentially carbon-free future, where innovation, diversification and education play a decisive role.

Sustainability Report

The protection of the region and people’s health have always been our priorities. This is why we have doubled down on our efforts in recent months, outlining new paths of collaboration and support.

Archive 2022 Sustainabilty Report

Short stories

The future? Green and full of energy

Water, wind and sun: three crucial natural elements but also the sources of the renewable energy produced by the CVA Group.
For over two decades these forces of nature, with which we have established a harmonious relationship based on respect, have been our allies in the production of 100% green, carbon-neutral energy. We are a unique organisation in the Italian energy sector. Although we have strong roots in the Aosta Valley, we look beyond our confines to embrace sustainable models of energy production and consumption, rethinking economic activities, mobility and tourism to protect and promote the resources available to us today in order to safeguard tomorrow.
The force of water, the warmth of the sun and the power of the wind help us light up thousands of homes every day, building a cleaner, more sustainable future together. The CVA Group is able to meet the electricity requirements of more than 1 million households.

Water, the energy of our Land

The CVA Group owns and directly manages one of the biggest Italian hydroelectric portfolios, consisting of 6 large dams, 61 intakes, more than 210 km of channels, about 50 km of penstocks and 32 hydroelectric power plants. The Aosta Valley, in particular, is one of Italy’s biggest renewable energy producing regions. The hydroelectric power plants, with their dams, reservoirs and channels, are a widespread presence across the region. The plant portfolio, with total power of 934.5 MW, produces around 2.9 billion kWh of clean hydroelectric energy every year: in 2021, CVA ranked fifth among domestic producers in the sector. The total reservoir capacity equates to half the water consumed every day in Italy. The hydroelectric sector is able to make a significant contribution to the environment because it responds to the most stringent European recommendations on climate change, greenhouse gas reduction and the average rise in temperature in at least three important ways...

Aiming high with wind energy

In recent years the wind power sector has undergone a technological evolution that now makes it possible to maximise generating capacity even at less windy sites: for this and other reasons, wind energy is now a mature renewable source with great prospects for rapid growth. The CVA Group is active in the production of wind energy in Italy thanks to 8 wind farms located in the Aosta Valley (3 wind turbines), Lazio (21 wind turbines), Apulia (30 wind turbines), Tuscany (4 wind turbines) and Campania (11 wind turbines). In 2021, CVA’s wind farms produced 315 million kWh, the equivalent electricity consumption of around 115,000 households.
With an installed capacity of 42 MW, the Piansano (Viterbo) wind farm is the CVA Group’s biggest facility. It now comprises twenty-one 2 MW Vestas V90 wind turbines, which have a hub height (the point at which the blades are attached) of 80 metres and a rotor diameter of 90 metres. Did you know that the length of one blade of these wind turbines is 44 metres, roughly equal to the height of a 15-storey building?

CVA Group at high altitude

We are so used to turning on the lights or charging our smartphones at the flick of a switch that it is easy to forget that the production and distribution of energy is the result of a sophisticated and complex process, as is the work required to keep electricity grids functioning properly and safely.
In fact, electricity distribution networks are often located in places that are inaccessible because of the environmental conditions. In our mountains, one common problem in winter is snow on the pylons, which can turn into ice and cause major disruption to the community.

Designing a sustainable future

World has six months to avert climate crisis, says energy expert. This is the title of an article that appeared in The Guardian on 18 June 2020, featuring comments by Fatih Birol, executive director of the IEA – International Energy Agency, which anticipate the importance of combining the issues of energy and sustainability to safeguard the environment.
“The next three years will determine the course of the next 30 years and beyond. If we do not take action, we will surely see a rebound in greenhouse gas emissions.” Birol refers to the considerable fall in emissions, which plunged 17% in April 2020 during the global lockdown triggered by the COVID-19 emergency. As we have gradually emerged from lockdown, emissions have begun to rise again.

Renewable ever since

The CVA Group’s Sustainability Reports are designed to report and illustrate the economic, environmental and social results the Group has achieved to all of its stakeholders. The documents are prepared in accordance with the Global Reporting Initiative’s GRI Standards, currently the most widely used national and international standards for non-financial reporting, under the GRI “core” option. Access the archive of past editions.

Carbon Footprint

We offset the emissions of our “INSIEME 2021” business convention

Consistent with our environmental mission, in 2021 we decided to reduce the emissions generated by our business convention.
616 employees connected via streaming, more than 50 guests, a musical performance, staging, the sending of emails and much more: our annual meeting produced 930 kg of CO₂. In terms of emissions, this is roughly the equivalent of keeping your blender running non-stop for about a year. To put it another way, a forest of about 42 apple trees would be needed to capture the same amount of CO₂ emitted by the event.

We offset the emissions by supporting certified environmental protection projects created for the sole purpose of reducing CO2.

At the end of the event, every participant at INSIEME 2021 received a code enabling them to select the environmental protection projects with which to offset the emissions produced by their online participation in the convention.

Check out the accredited Up2You account on the VERRA Registry, the international body that develops and manages carbon credits, through which carbon credits are allocated to the CVA Group, and see which projects are currently being supported on the map below.

VERRA Registry