The cold ironing, namely the facilities that allow ships to berth in ports to turn off the engines on board and to tie up to the power grid of land for their energy needs, are crucial for decarbonisation of shipping. Assshipowners support him a few days from the preliminary agreement on the Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulation (AFIR) and the FuelEU Maritime reached by negotiators from the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union, which are intended to have been welcomed by the Italian shipowner's association which has seen its own bodies receient.

In particular, Assshipowners pointed out that the AFIR Regulation should strengthen the development of infrastructure for alternative fuels and the network to draw electricity from land, development which was already initiated by AFID (Directive on infrastructure for alternative fuels), through national mandatory targets. For the maritime sector, in line with the demands of the FuelEU Maritime initiative, Member States are required to ensure the availability of the source of the land electricity (cold ironing) by the first January 2030 for ports of the TEN-T network on the basis of criteria related to the frequency of the presence of passenger vessels and container carriers, and points for the bunkering of liquefied methane (LNG, liquefied biogas, liquefied synthetic methane and mixtures of these) by the first January 2025. In addition, it is required to develop a national policy framework by 2025 that includes an infrastructure implementation plan for use by alternative fuel vessels, such as methanol, other than liquefied methane.

" Ensuring the necessary alignment of the obligations of using the cold ironing imposed on ships by FuelEU Maritime with the corresponding infrastructure-level requirements set up with the AFIR-noted the President of Assshipowners, Stefano Messina-it was one of our main demands. In this sense we welcome the exemption from sanctions for the shipowner in the event that the vessel is equipped to draw energy from the ground but could not do so for lack or malfunction of the same network maintained in the FuelEU agreement Maritime. The shipowners have made investments and are ready to use the cold ironing in the ports where it is available. We are talking about a fundamental instrument not only in view of the obligations introduced by the FuelEU Maritime Regulation, but also and above all to avoid that, with the introduction of the new rules set by the IMO with the Carbon, " The Intensity Indicator (CII), whose current declines severely penalize units in staging, a large share of the Italian fleet could be in fact put out of the market. "

With regard to the progress of the installation projects of cold ironing plants in Italian ports, the President of Assshipowners reminded that " within the supplementary Fund, 700 million euros have been allocated to the PNRR, precisely for the purpose of the cold ironing in Italian ports and some projects are already in progress. " Messina specified that, however, as the association has repeatedly stressed, " a national and system vision needs to be taken. Making scathing and different interventions not only among each individual Port System Authority, but also within the same scalp between terminals and terminals, would mean wasting massive public resources and not reaching out to the results hoped for in terms of emission reduction in addition to the fact that this would result in a serious distortion in the market for terminalistic and maritime services. In fact, only a uniform infrastructure would allow it not to alter the level playing field between the same terminalistic businesses and their shipowners. The solution for the cold ironing has to be the opening to the market, with a clear separation between those who will have to carry out the infrastructure, who will have to feed it and who will have to keep it offering the services to the ship. The objective can only be to ensure a safe and efficient service as well as provided to the most economically competitive conditions. "