The Idea Factory: home-grown innovation

Terna employees, with their intuition, talent, skills and professional drive, are a wellspring of innovative, technological and sustainable solutions within the company. After careful assessment and consideration, these solutions can grow into real, concrete projects that generate added value not just for the company itself, but for the wider community too — i.e. its main stakeholders — and help to achieve the targets of energy transition. This is the underlying principle of corporate entrepreneurship, and the heart of Terna Ideas: an initiative which the Italian national transmission grid operator has been engaged in for a number of years now, with great success. In other words, it’s true home-grown innovation.

To date, the innovation programme for the Group’s personnel has actively involved 800 people and generated over 300 ideas, many of which have resulted in completed project while others are under development. In fact, while the three editions of the programme have seen a total of eight winning ideas, twelve accelerated ideas have gone on to be developed as projects, and no fewer than 34 have gone through a dedicated incubation period. And that’s not all: there have been four patent applications, two of which focus on people’s safety, a major priority for the TSO’s activities. These numbers are a testament to the importance and value of the initiative, which has broadened its scope over the years to embrace the external ecosystem of start-ups too.

DTS: a winning idea to improve the efficiency of the electricity system. In the most recent edition of Terna Ideas in 2023, the award went to the team that developed DTS, short for Deterministic Target Synchronisation. As this is the first time this solution has been deployed anywhere in the world, Terna has already filed a patent. Simply put, it consists of an analysis software that uses a deterministic algorithm to improve the management of synchronous compensators, in order to guarantee increased efficiency and stability within the Italian electricity system. But what exactly is a synchronous compensator? Well, it’s a piece of equipment specially designed to regulate electricity flows on the grid and improve the management of renewable sources, which are the real cornerstones of the electricity system and will become increasingly important for the future. These machines minimise power surges caused by the intermittent nature of wind and solar sources, which are inherently unpredictable and non-programmable, as well as stabilising the grid quickly to improve its functionality. In short, they enable the full and safe integration of clean energy. For this reason, Terna — whose national electricity grid Security Plan sets out 1.7 billion euros in investments by 2028 — has already installed dozens of them at key points of the grid and particularly in the South, where clean energy sources are concentrated.

But back to DTS: thanks to Terna Ideas, the team behind this brainwave — consisting of Domenico Tedeschi (Local Measurements and Tests, National Transmission Grid department), Danilo Capone (Regulation Plants, Grid and Dispatching Development Strategies department), Luca Buono (Plant Studies and Calculations, Grid and Dispatching Development Strategies department), Tommaso Serni (Synchronous Compensators and Special Machinery, Grid and Dispatching Development Strategies department) — will have the chance to bring it to life over the coming months, using all the support and resources that the company will provide to make it a reality. What’s more, it’s clear that the quality of the projects submitted to Terna Ideas is increasing significantly, bringing Terna’s concrete business goals closer and closer.

«DTS is a system that allows the synchronous compensators to be operated in perfect parallel. This solution results in less thermal and dynamic stress for the machines, which in turn means extending the useful life and improving the resilience of the plants, thereby reducing market costs. The starting point for the idea was a study based on collecting experimental data and processing them through dedicated software, which provides analytical solutions to the problem in question. To date, there are no comparable solutions in the world. This is the first time the issue has been tackled using an analytical method. The literature only includes probabilistic studies that have found no application, or which are not applicable to the type of plants standardised by Terna», explain the creators of the DTS solution.

From resilience to new ways of working: all the challenges tackled in the third edition of Terna Ideas. The third edition of Terna Ideas saw around 250 of Terna’s personnel take part, many of them based in the various offices spread throughout Italy. Participants were asked to submit their ideas on how to manage the evolution of the electricity system, how to improve the performance and resilience of the transmission grids, how to increase the efficiency of maintenance activities and reduce the related risks, and how best to handle the new ways of working, in order to help create a company where people and their unique skills are increasingly at the centre.

As well as selecting DTS as the winner, the judging panel — led by Terna’s CEO and GM Giuseppina Di Foggia, along with Chairman Igor De Biasio — also singled out two ideas for special mentions: ECO'S and Terna Cares. Both were deemed to align perfectly with the concept of the “just transition” which underpins Terna's 2024-2028 Industrial Plan. This concept sets out how the goal of energy transition, which must be facilitated by simultaneous digitalisation and innovation — referred to as the twin transition — goes hand-in-hand with the adoption of a sustainable business model aimed at achieving a fair and inclusive transition that considers possible impacts on all stakeholders.

Specifically, ECO’S is an application in the area of the circular economy and sustainability. It relies on artificial intelligence to bring together data on the materials held in the warehouses in a single digital space, and allows the waste produced by Terna and its sale to third parties to be managed in a simple, functional and optimised manner. This reflects the desire to integrate circularity into the business model, and to turn what is currently a cost for the Group into an asset. Meanwhile, “Terna Cares” is a new and intuitive web platform which brings together all the company’s proposals for volunteering activities, to assist the Group’s personnel with such initiatives. These two ideas will also be adopted by Terna, brought to life and integrated into company initiatives.

«Over the past three years, Terna Ideas has proven to be an incredibly useful vehicle for spreading the culture of innovation within the Group. Once again, this third edition has shown the exceptional talent we’ve got within the company». These are the words of Terna’s Innovation & Market Solutions Director, Massimiliano Garri. «At the heart of the programme is the goal of giving all our colleagues the opportunity to show off their skills, suggest ideas, work together and do something practical. We assist that process with training and tutors within the company that help foster an ability to get things done. Not only does this internal accelerated pathway allow innovative and sustainable projects to be pursued, it also lets us develop new intellectual property opportunities, an approach that fits in perfectly with the foundations of the 2024-2028 Industrial Plan», added Garri.

The best solutions from the first edition of Terna Ideas were: B.I.G. Blue in Green, suggested to conceive, design and create work spaces in a natural, open and sustainable environment, with individual and team workstations that can be used all year round, regardless of the weather, to benefit the psychological and physical well-being of people and their creativity and productivity; RUT, to further increase the safety of Terna’s field operators, simplifying the maintenance of electrical infrastructure through the use of a universal device that detects the presence of voltage in the system; and SAMAT, a solution to increase the safety of Terna’s technicians and optimise working times thanks to the development of an innovative system which minimises the risk exposure of the personnel involved in maintenance operations on electrical substations.

Next, the winners of the 2022 edition of Terna Ideas were: De-Icing, which involves the use of a heat box to melt the ice sleeves that form on the conductors of power lines in the winter months, a solution that makes it possible to intervene remotely; Terna Reliability, a device that monitors the technical parameters of transformers and optimises activities to make the assets more efficient, with benefits for the resilience of the entire electricity system; and Orion, an artificial intelligence algorithm that helps to improve the resolution of the satellite images needed to promptly identify buildings and structures interfering with the easement bands of power lines. Moreover, a special mention went to Electrendicity, a simulator game for training on the electricity market, a key topic for enabling the energy transition.

The Terna Ideas platform: open to the external ecosystem of start-ups and innovative SMEs. Participants accessed the Terna Ideas - Corporate Entrepreneurship programme with the support of the dedicated Terna Ideas platform. While initially built for the Group’s corporate entrepreneurship programme, it has evolved into a space open to the external ecosystem as well as to innovators within the company, in order to attract as many players as possible from the wide world of innovation. Therefore, innovative start-ups and SMEs can freely submit their solutions on the platform, or take part in any of the challenges periodically announced in this virtual space. Last year, for example, a challenge was issued on the theme of “Data Science for Resilience”, with the goal of identifying digital solutions to constantly improve the resilience of the national transmission grid. Eoliann and Fast Computing were the two start-ups chosen by Terna to embark on a proof-of-concept stage at the end of the first-ever call for ideas launched on the “Terna Ideas” open innovation platform.

Innovation and digitalisation: the pillars of the energy transition. The energy transition is a profound transformation of systems which demands the development of new digital solutions, offering an extraordinary opportunity for technological evolution in which innovation plays a key role. This is particularly true in the energy sector and, most of all, when it comes to electricity. In order to achieve the goals of the “twin” energy and digital transition, against a backdrop of growing complexity, decentralisation and increasingly widespread renewable sources, the new 2024-2028 Industrial Plan from Terna sets out investments of around 2 billion euros, which will focus particularly on digitalisation and innovation initiatives.

Key among these will be grid engineering: software to support planning for the digitalisation of construction sites and to optimise order management, in order to help projects reach completion in accordance with their planned schedules. But technology will also provide support with dispatching, one of Terna’s main activities in balancing electricity flows on the grid, moment by moment. Innovation will help to increase the algorithmic capacities of its systems, including developments in artificial intelligence, in order to strengthen transmission capacity. Moreover, asset management, faced with the increasing complexity expected for grid management, will continue to make use of digital technologies such as Digital Twin, the Internet of Things (IoT) and predictive tools.