New electricity grids, smart cities and asset management. These are some of the innovative projects being worked on by the 8 international startups that EDP has brought together in Oviedo this week to present their initiatives as part of the Energy Starter acceleration programme. With this programme, the energy company is looking for investment opportunities that will allow it to accelerate the energy transition.

Energy Starter consists of three modules. The one presented in Oviedo, focused on electricity distribution, and two others, on renewable energies and customer solutions, which will take place in the coming months. These are the three main areas in which the company is working and in which it plans to invest 24,000 million euros up to 2025 as part of its Strategic Plan.

According to EDP Spain's Director of Sustainability and Innovation, Yolanda Fernández, "our objective with this module is to put the best start-ups in the field of electricity grids in contact with technicians from our EDP Group grid companies in Spain, Portugal and Brazil to identify possible pilot projects to test their solutions".

The CEO of EDP Redes España, Miguel Mateos, also participated in the event with a presentation on the future of electricity grids and their importance in the energy transition.

The startups participating in this module focused on electricity grids are working on providing the grid with greater flexibility and intelligence, through artificial intelligence, data analysis, the use of advanced software and automation. They are the following:

Heimdall Power (Norway): develops sensors that, located in the grid, make it possible to obtain data to make decisions to operate the grid and maintain optimum supply quality.
Idénergie (Canada): has a device that provides reliability to electricity grids, mainly in areas where there is distributed generation and penetration of electric vehicles.
Ionate (United Kingdom): they connect a device to the grid to measure parameters that facilitate the operation of electricity infrastructures.
Liveable Cities (Canada): offers integrated solutions to support the development of smart cities.
Noteworthy AI (United States): develops a solution for checking electricity grids using the company's own fleet of vehicles, with cameras and artificial intelligence.
PiniOn Tecnología (Brazil): has a solution that automates the collection of meter readings and evaluates the state of the grid.
QualityStorm (Brazil): working on a solution for inspecting network assets by taking photographs.
Quiron Digital (Brazil): they have a system that creates algorithms to monitor and mitigate the effects of vegetation in the environments where electricity grids are located.
These companies will hold meetings with all the distribution areas of the EDP Group (Brazil, Spain and Portugal) with the aim of carrying out pilot projects in the coming months, validating their solutions and with the possibility of EDP incorporating them into its activity and even investing in them.