The Terna Innovation Zones and the future of innovation. A interview with Carla Napolitano

«The TIZs are places where we transform promising ideas into industry-ready solutions. We work with top-tier partners to identify technologies that can be of use to the electricity system and test them under controlled conditions, all the way up to their full-scale deployment.

Our mission is to create tangible impacts: improving grid resilience, increasing operational efficiency and accelerating the energy transition. To achieve this, we combine internal sources of innovation — ideas from our own people and intrapreneurship projects — with external collaborations, for example, through the venture client model, becoming the first industrial clients of solutions developed by startups and innovative companies».

«Each TIZ adapts to the characteristics of its location. Our operations rest on four pillars: scouting for technology (intercepting trends and opportunities); co-innovation (developing projects with local and international partners); support for the ecosystem (giving momentum to startups and SMEs by becoming their first client); and impact on skills (working with universities and schools to attract and nurture talent). The result is a virtuous cycle: the area benefits from new skills and opportunities for development, while Terna accelerates the adoption of technologies important to the grid».

«We look for the presence of strategic infrastructure and assess the potential of the local ecosystem. To date we have four active TIZs: Silicon Valley (San Francisco), the global point of reference for emerging technologies; Tunis, an initiative with significant social value, launched alongside the Elmed project for electrical interconnection between Europe and North Africa; the Adriatic TIZ (Ascoli Piceno), which is connected to the Adriatic Link infrastructure and to a growing entrepreneurial ecosystem; and Turin, a hub oriented towards Europe, with electric mobility and robotics laboratories and a central role in cleantech. Our goal is to connect “advanced” and “emerging” ecosystems in a global innovation network, as well as organising public forums and topical studies to engage communities».

«Our starting point is business needs and the Group’s strategic priorities. From there, we initiate scouting, analyse solutions, select partners and set up pilot projects. The pathway is clear: lab testing, field trials, scale demonstrations and integration into operational processes.
Each initiative is measured by performance indicators and impact reports, allowing us to decide quickly what to scale and what to improve. This keeps the quality of results high in the electricity system».

«One particularly noteworthy example is our collaboration with Eoliann, an Italian climate-tech startup that uses satellite data and machine-learning algorithms to predict the likelihood, intensity and impact of extreme weather events. This Turin-based startup was identified by one of our structures dedicated to the Ecosystem and Scouting. At the same time, an internal business need had emerged in relation to grid resilience and the management of environmental risk.
The collaboration with Eoliann was further strengthened by Terna’s Investments team, which focused on the startup by means of the corporate venture capital instrument (investment in equity) to accelerate its technological developments of interest to the Group. This case represents a successful model of integrated collaboration, which rose directly out of the ecosystem and would later become a TIZ».

«The European electricity system is undergoing its most significant transformation in the last century: from the mass integration of renewables to the electrification of industry and cities, up to physical and cyber security risks and growing climate volatility. No transmission operator can face these challenges alone: scale and cooperation are necessary preconditions for the resilience and competitiveness of the European system. This is precisely where the TSO Innovation Alliance comes in: an initiative that unites Transmission System Operators, aimed at accelerating system innovation and making the evolution of electricity grids a visible, high-priority topic on the global agenda, partly in response to the fragmentation that has so far hindered the interests of startups, investors and research centres. Our goal is to achieve critical mass and speak with a European voice, in line with recommendations on bolstering technological strength and with the guidelines of the EU package for grid interoperability and digitisation».

«We are equal partners in an alliance forged for a simple yet ambitious goal: to accelerate grid-centric innovation. The first landmark operation is a multilateral Venture Client Program co-designed and co-managed by the eight TSOs: shared prioritisation of issues, a single European call, mixed design teams, shared PoCs (Proofs of Concept), a common data environment and a multi-grid industrial validation route designed for scalability, so that solutions gain immediate credibility and the potential for adoption at European level. This approach reduces duplication, increases impact, accelerates the journey to technological maturity and makes TSOs more attractive to startups, investors, research centres and Big Tech. The alliance has a roadmap for the future: to build a European GridTech Platform that connects hubs, laboratories, testbeds, data platforms and GridTech players throughout the entire innovation cycle — from idea to scale — based on shared data, assets and expertise, co-development and co-investment. The 2025-2028 path is clear: from foundation and the first venture client program to the establishment of governance and resilience pilots with shared datasets, up to the launch of the shared data platform and the European network of interconnected laboratories».