Riviera Trasporti’s never-ending embarrassment over the hydrogen project has finally come to an end. Bitter, blatant, and unmistakable. The storage center, the property where the plants are located, and the buses acquired with European community funding will all be deactivated.
Giovanni Barbagallo, the company’s head of the board of directors, verified this last night in the municipal council. He will be the “liquidator” of one of the largest failures, to the detriment of the community, set up by the local public transportation business, which is in a debt settlement agreement with creditors. «We recommended decommissioning the Rt 45,000 per year in surface rights hydrogen storage facility established in the Armea Valley, as well as the three clean energy buses acquired with European community financing. The forecast is included in the court-filed composition plan. The hydrogen project had to pay a price in terms of image: it had to make obvious to the public that it was a test project. We have not decided to forsake hydrogen because we feel it will not play a significant part in clean transportation in the future, but at the current costs, it is not feasible for a small firm like ours », said Barbagallo.
The undertaking
What happened to the community’s three hydrogen buses, which cost 7 million euros? Two have been standing motionless for years, hooked up to the power 24 hours a day like a terminally ill patient, while the third has vanished entirely. Riviera Trasporti’s cars, which were introduced in November 2018, did not endure six months on the province’s highways. 3.3 percent of the European Union.
Those lovely buses now sit at the San Martino depot, a symbol of the future and sustainable energy. The tires have quadratized as a result of being stopped for so long. The third component of the European initiative High V.lo City is spread across the Armea Valley: a hydrogen refueling station erected in a location that is difficult to access even for a regular vehicle, let alone a 16-meter courier. length, such as the VanHoll hydrogen ones.
Only three of the five buses slated for Rt arrived in Imperia province. Due to a shortage of cash, two were returned. Each of the experimental cars kept at the San Martino depot cost the provincial firm almost 1.2 million euros, to which the refueling station charges must be included for a total figure. For a long time, there hasn’t been any hydrogen. Purchasing it from the nearest French manufacturing plant is prohibitively expensive, and replacement parts are plentiful.