Terna and Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia together for innovation and research

Rome (Italy), 7th April 2023 – Terna, the company led by Stefano Donnarumma that manages the national transmission grid, and Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT- Italian Institute of Technology) have signed a five-year collaboration agreement aimed at studying and implementing innovative solutions in the field of robotics to support the company’s field activities.

The agreement was signed on April 6th in Rome by Massimiliano Garri, Terna’s Head of Innovation & Market Solutions, and Giorgio Metta, IIT Scientific Director.

“We are proud to start the collaboration with an excellence on the Italian research and innovation scene,” said Massimiliano Garri, Terna’s Head of Innovation & Market Solutions. “The robotic solutions we will implement with the IIT will support our people, ensuring an even higher level of safety in the operations they carry out every day throughout Italy. The partnership that begins today will allow us to evolve, innovate and make our operations even more efficient, with important benefits for the entire national electricity grid”.

The Scientific Director of Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Giorgio Metta, said: “We were established with the aim of putting the technologies developed in our laboratories at the service of the country’s economy and its production system. The agreement signed today with Terna fully achieves this important vocation of the Institute, confirming us as an instrument of innovation and underlining our commitment to the development of technologies that support human beings and make work safer.”

The development of new solutions is crucial to Terna, which, as a director and enabler of the energy transition, is daily engaged in researching and adopting innovative technologies to meet the main challenges posed by national and international decarbonisation targets.

Thanks to the collaboration with the IIT and the Institute’s know-how in the field of automation and robotics, Terna will thus be able to develop new technological solutions to support consolidated operations and maintenance in the daily management of approximately 75,000 km of high and extra-high voltage power lines and over 900 electrical substations throughout Italy.

The Italian Institute of Technology and Terna have already identified some initial, specific cases to be developed and tested together, such as, for instance: autonomous robots capable of carrying out operations on pylons supporting overhead power lines, advanced systems for monitoring electrical substations in the absence of human operators, and devices such as exoskeletons to support the work of field personnel. During the collaboration, Terna and IIT will also consider taking steps to protect intellectual property with the aim of protecting and enhancing research results.

Terna’s innovation plan aims to manage the evolution of the electricity system, increase the performance and resilience of the transmission grids, increase efficiency and minimise the risks arising from maintenance, as well as to better cope with new ways of working by helping to create a company where people are increasingly at the centre; all this with a focus on sustainability and energy transition as key factors in the company’s business, in favour of a just transition that creates value and benefits for the company, its stakeholders and the surrounding system.