From visibility to control: how Italy is building the Digital Grid of the future

As electricity systems become increasingly decentralized and electrified, distribution system operators (DSOs) face a growing challenge: managing a grid that is more dynamic, less predictable, and more difficult to control.

In Italy, this challenge has been addressed through a multi-year regulatory and industrial effort that is turning observability and controllability into operational capabilities at scale.

These topics are explored in a recent Energy Transitions Podcast podcast by Enlit, featuring Flavia Serri, Grid Solutions Engineer, and Gianluca Sapienza, Head of Grid Engineering Services at Gridspertise Group, who discuss how these concepts translate into operational reality, drawing on Italy's ongoing national program.

Defining observability and controllability in today's regulatory context

Italy's observability and controllability project, launched in 2020 and still evolving, offers a practical example of how European regulatory objectives can be translated into operational capabilities. The program is grounded in the European Commission's system operation guidelines and involves the Italian Transmission System Operator (TSO), Terna, all the Italian DSOs, the national regulatory authority (ARERA), and the national standards committee.

The observability component provides DSOs and the TSO with measurements from distributed energy resources, with a sampling frequency of four seconds.

This near real-time visibility represents a step change compared to traditional grid monitoring, enabling faster regulation in contingencies, voltage optimization, maintenance planning, and grid topology decisions.

The scale of this transformation is significant. In a system with roughly 140 GW of installed capacity, the program has made at least 10 GW of distributed generation newly visible—capacity that was previously unobserved. To put this into perspective, Italy’s peak demand is around 50 GW, meaning that a share equivalent to roughly one-fifth of peak load can now be actively monitored and managed, turning what was once marginal into a system-relevant resource.

The controllability component operates through the same infrastructure, relying on central plant controllers (Controllori Centrali di Impainto - CCI) installed at generation units, which act as the interface between DSO systems and distributed resources. Through these devices, DSOs can send standardized commands, including active and reactive power control and setpoint management.

The challenges of deploying at national scale

Moving from a pilot project to a nationwide program reveals challenges that technical design alone cannot anticipate.

Serri was direct: "Coordination, for me, is the most difficult thing, because it is about humans. And human behavior is a bit less predictable."

Cybersecurity represented another major step change. For the first time, DSO infrastructure had to communicate securely with customer-side devices, namely the central plant controllers (CCI) installed at generation units. This entailed new requirements for secure communication, including encryption, authentication, and certificate management, significantly increasing deployment complexity.

Regulatory requirements also evolved across milestones, demanding ongoing adaptation, while managing communication with a dispersed base of industrial clients across Italy added further coordination complexity.

Beyond certification: ensuring real interoperability

One lesson that proved particularly valuable: the distinction between certification and integration testing. All central plant controllers submitted for the program were certified against IEC 61850 (an international standard for communication networks and data models in electrical substations and power grids) and relevant cybersecurity standards. Yet certification alone did not guarantee correct interoperability.

As Serri observed: "If you are IEC 61850-certified but you do not apply the correct data model in the exact way the normative requires, the data may not reach its destination.”

This is why Gridspertise's laboratories, in Milan and Bari, were open to industry partners, testing the full operational chain from the plant controller through the communication infrastructure, cybersecurity certificates, and up to the SCADA system, using real-time digital simulators.

This approach reduced field costs, shortened deployment time, and caught interoperability issues before they became operational problems.

From controlling generation to orchestrating flexible demand

A recurring theme is the role of standardization - not as a compliance exercise, but as a strategic enabler of scalability, interoperability, and long-term resilience.

Sapienza framed this plainly: "It is not possible to manage a complex power system like the electric power system through the market alone. It is also necessary to set up industrial projects."

The Italian program demonstrates this in practice. By anchoring technical specifications in national and European standards, the architecture is reusable across future extensions of the program including, in the near term, observability and controllability for EV charging infrastructure.

When smart loads can be observed and modulated in the same framework as non-programmable renewables, DSOs gain a complementary tool: load flexibility that can partially offset the variability of generation. 

As Sapienza noted, this convergence represents, "the near future of the electric power system and, in my opinion, the key project for the future power system operations.

Italy as a reference model for European DSOs

One of the most significant outcomes of the Italian program is its replicability. The project is anchored in the European Commission's system operation guidelines, a framework of organizational requirements, roles and responsibilities that is available to every European country.  

As Sapienza said: "The power system is not separated by boundaries, so we have to consider it as a unique power system at a European level. It is true for both operational infrastructures and defense infrastructures.”

Serri reinforced this directly: "I hope that the fact that the Italian case is not just a pilot project, but a large-scale reality, can be the driver of a transition also in the rest of EU. Of course, when you start something like this as a company or as a DSO, you have to invest in research and development, and if this has already been done by somebody else, it can be easier to close the gap."

For DSOs elsewhere in Europe, the question is no longer whether this transition is possible, but how quickly can it be replicated. The Italian program shows that large-scale observability and controllability is not a future ambition; it is an operational reality.