Ben Lane, CIPRE event manager, met Adrian Grilli, EUTC Technology Advisor.
Adrian will be speaking at Critical Infrastructure Protection & Resilience Europe, October 14-16, Brindisi, Italy – www.cipre-expo.com – in our Communications Sector Symposium
Technology is rapidly changing the role of telecom in Europe’s electric, gas and water utilities, energy companies and other critical infrastructure companies. They have vast experience in building and managing sophisticated telecommunications networks, but now face new challenges introducing new wireless communications systems and managing telecoms in a shared services environment.
Moreover, critical infrastructure has experienced spectacular changes resulting from new regulatory imperatives for sustainability. To face both challenges, EUTC has modified its legal status by becoming independent from its US parent, UTC, and has developed programs which are led and designed by Europeans, and uniquely European in focus.
Ben Lane:
Hello Adrian.
Adrian Grilli:
Thanks for having me.
Ben Lane:
It is a pleasure. Can you tell us a little about yourself.
Adrian Grilli:
I’m the Technology Advisor at EUTC. I’ve been involved in utility telecoms for about 25 years, initially as a spectrum manager for UK transmission and distribution companies for gas and electricity. I’ve represented the utility sector in various international organisations and particularly spectrum. Before moving to the private sector, I worked in government, in radio regulation, standards, policy and other regulatory affairs. My background essentially is working in government and switching to the private sector.
Ben Lane:
Thank you. Could you provide a brief overview of EUTC’s key aims and objectives.
Adrian Grilli:
We’re an association of electricity and gas transmission and distribution operators, as well as generators, across Europe and now African utilities. We represent the telecom side of the energy and water sectors. If you think about a modern electricity network, you can’t operate without telecoms. When you look at a control room, you will see a group of people managing a nationwide or regional network. Without telecoms they can’t see what’s going on and they can’t control anything. So that’s why telecoms are vital to any modern energy network.
Ben Lane:
Can you explain EUTC’s role in the debate on radio spectrum allocation for European utilities and CI please?
Adrian Grilli:
Radio spectrum is important to us. Traditionally we’ve used copper wire for our communications and there’s a lot of fibre in the network. As we’ve deployed more renewables, you’ve got a lot more devices connected to the network. Therefore, radio is critical to developing modern networks and it’s good for resilience. Fibre complemented by radio is extremely resilient. Ideally, we need dedicated radio spectrum for those networks to operate reliably. The networks are nationwide, they must cover remote areas and ideally go below ground. So, you need radio spectrum, which will enable you to get good geographic coverage and penetration with as few base stations as possible, because then you can make the network highly resilient; the higher the number of base stations, the more difficult it is to make a network resilient. So, we’re very keen on dedicated spectrum for utilities.
Ben Lane:
Describe how EUTC fosters awareness and maturity of cyber security and resilience of networks among utility companies in Europe.
Adrian Grilli:
Cybersecurity is obviously a very big field and there are lots of actors involved but it’s not our central focus at EUTC. What we look at particularly, is the interaction between cybersecurity and telecoms in operational networks. Security in operational networks is different to fixed IT networks, in that if your network is under attack, you must keep operating. And even if that network is penetrated, such as a national transmission network or electric distribution, you have got to try and continue to operate as you deal with that cyber threat. You can’t close the network down.
Because we’ve got a lot of radio communications, and often this is limited in terms of bandwidth, the security cannot consume too much bandwidth. And in operational networks, latency can be an issue. Sometimes you’ve got to control things quickly and that means that your security cannot take an indefinite amount of time.
Resilience is obviously crucial. Modern society depends on electricity and society falls apart without it; our food is refrigerated, our financial systems need power, our telecoms need electricity. Keeping electricity networks going is really a big challenge. Resilience means not only keeping them going, but if they do fail, getting them back into operation as quickly as possible.
Ben Lane:
I found this quote attributed to you. “The utility man has buttons, belt and braces on his trousers to ensure they don’t fall down. The wise utility telecoms manager designs diversity in communication paths and ensures good power backup to guarantee their comms never fail.” Can you just give us a bit more around that?
Adrian Grilli:
Resilience has many dimensions. Ideally, we’d want our systems to be 100% available, but nothing is 100%. We generally work to five nines, 99.999% availability, which is 20 minutes outage a year. Transmission networks often work to six nines: which is very high availability. You don’t want any single point of failure. A major control room may have three fibre connections, but those fibre connections go out of the control room in three different directions, so that you avoid “JCB corrosion”, as we call it, when a digger goes through all your lines.
Ben Lane:
What lessons can we learn from the April 2025 power failure in Spain and Portugal?
Adrian Grilli:
The European power grid is highly resilient because of its interconnections. So, every country supports the other countries around these interconnectors, but when things go wrong, those interconnectors often must be isolated to prevent the whole grid, the whole of Europe, crashing its electricity system. What we’ve seen in the days of fossil fuel generation are large generators that had a lot of inertia, and they would ride through minor disturbances in the network. As we’ve moved to more renewables and particularly wind and solar, they’re connected through inverters and reduces the inertia in the system. And of course they’re intermittent, so they come on and they go off. Our network was never built for that.
Also, in the early days when we had a few big generators, they poured in energy at the top and it came out of your plug at the bottom. It was a one-way system. Now it’s a two-way system, and therefore monitoring control is crucial to keep the networks running. And as we’ve seen with this failure in Iberia and the failure in Italy in 2003; when things go wrong, if you do lose control, they go spectacularly wrong. Our aim in the utility sector is to prevent this happening; but when they do happen, to get back to normality quickly.
Ben Lane:
How do we get a true picture of what happened? Regulators and operators are not revealing much information about the failure in Spain and Portugal.
Adrian Grilli:
Getting the true picture is always very complex. People are very careful about what they say because of potential legal repercussions. It is never just one cause. If it was just one item, then the network would be able to cope. And where we’ve seen in the past these catastrophic grid failures, it’s several things happening in very close proximity to one another and the systems can’t respond quickly enough.
If we look at the Iberian problem, clearly there were several things interacting together which caused the ultimate failure. What is well-known is that there was a lot of solar generation on the network. There was also wind generation, so renewables connected through inverters were a large percentage of the generation and the amount of inertia on the system was very low.
At the same time, they were also using a lot of energy to restore pump storage systems, so they were pumping water from the lower reservoirs to the higher reservoirs. That meant there wasn’t a lot of hydro available to give extra inertia.
What seems to be unclear is the role of the interconnectors. Spain was interconnected with France and there seemed to be discussions about which direction the power was flowing in and the potential influence of the interconnector with Morocco. So again, we saw multiple interactions.
In the 2003 Italian grid collapse, 6 interconnectors tripped within a minute, followed by another 5 two minutes later. You’re dealing with a very dynamic situation and it’s very difficult to get control back again once you lose it.
Ben Lane:
What are the findings of EUTC’s AI task force and what are the implications for the next five to 10 years.
Adrian Grilli:
AI is clearly very important to utilities. With all the monitoring and control we do, and with so much data available, it’s not possible to process it and get useful information out of it without machine help, so AI is vital going forward.
What we have found is that training AI systems can be very lengthy and data integrity is vital. You also need workforce engagement. This is happening as staff see that AI systems are helping them to do their jobs better and faster, take away some of the boring stuff and make the job more interesting.
To get these systems to work, there must be close collaboration between the user utility, the software supplier, and the hardware supplier. It’s not just a matter of buying something off the shelf and deploying it.
We’re also aware that AI systems are renowned for “hallucinations” and making completely erroneous decisions, and that’s why we are focusing on data integrity, and maintaining human oversight. You can’t let these systems have control without someone there checking what they’re doing. So, it’s going to be a very interesting development for utilities, but we do want to introduce AI under very tight control.
Ben Lane:
The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is a global consortium of standards development organisations that develop technical specifications for mobile telecommunications. Can you tell us about 3GPP standards and what features the utility sector can expect to see?
Adrian Grilli:
We’re engaged with 3GPP. It is a very onerous and resource intensive activity, but essential. The sort of features we are looking for in new 3GPP standards are high power user equipment because that will give us longer range and better networks. We’re interested in device-to-device, particularly the potential for gatewaying into networks and meshing. We’re also seeking to foster collaboration between telecom networks and power networks because we depend on each other. Another area is integration between non-terrestrial networks or satellites and terrestrial so that we have seamless roaming between various networks to enhance our telecoms resilience even more.
Ben Lane:
Okay, great. Thank you. We look forward to hearing more details on these topics when we are in Brindisi at CIPRE 2025, see more at https://www.cipre-expo.com/
Adrian Grilli:
Thank you and look forward to seeing you there.