Redeia's technology platform has been promoting innovation activities able to increase the efficiency and sustainability of the energy and telecommunications model since 2019.
Elewit, Redeia's technology platform, has been in existence for four years now, a period of time in which it has focused on driving, hand in hand with technological innovation, the energy transition and universal connectivity to build a sustainable future. All this with the aim of offering solutions to the new challenges of the electricity and telecommunications sectors.
As a subsidiary of Redeia, Elewit acts as a enabler and connector for the main companies and business units of the group, centralizing and catalyzing opportunities to introduce innovation in an agile way, developing its own projects or collaborating with other actors. The company has set up its own innovation ecosystem, which currently has 66 partners or collaborators, including universities and technology centers, startups and entrepreneurs, financial players, companies and institutions, and innovation communities and networks. This figure is complemented by the six startups in the portfolio of investees of its corporate venture capital.
These projects address all the key challenges defined by the company, aligned with Redeia's 2021-2025 Strategic Plan, to accelerate change in the energy and telecommunications fields, and are based on the technologies that Elewit identifies as enabling for this purpose which makes them unique.
Since 2019, the company has managed through its LAB de Innovación to develop internal innovation projects with technical feasibility into products or services that are becoming valuable in the market. This is the case of DALIA, software for the detection of anomalies in line inspection; ZEPAS, a portable zero-emission source; and PDEye, a solution for the automatic interpretation of discharges.
Silvia Bruno, Chief Innovation & Technology Officer at Elewit, points out: "In these first four years of life, we have strived to promote and develop innovative solutions that can be effectively incorporated into the day-to-day work of essential infrastructure managers such as Red Eléctrica or Hispasat. Tools such as DALIA, PDEye or ASUMO add extra value in the management and maintenance of our assets, which is a key point to advance in the energy transition and digital transformation".
Initiatives promoted by Elewit
In addition to the Innovation LAB, Elewit has launched several initiatives and programs. The Corporate Venture Capital, area has created a technological innovation investment vehicle to promote businesses and funds with a strong technological base that are committed to disruptive technological solutions in the energy and telecommunications sectors. The company has investmented in three venture capital funds specialized in deep tech and during these four years has analyzed projects and business models of more than 2,700 startups, becoming a shareholder in six of them: Zeleros, CounterCraft, NearbyComputing, HESStec, Aerolaser System, and OKTO GRID
On the other hand, it has organized four editions of the Venture Client Program, an initiative that focuses on identifying startups with innovative technologies that can generate efficiencies and improvements in Redeia's companies processes, and that can be validated through small innovation pilots, often generating not only new revenues for the startups, but even a new use case. So far, 26 startups have been selected and 28 pilots have been carried out, of which 38% have been adopted.
In addition, it has also promoted Despega, an Intrapreneurship program developed in collaboration with Redeia, whose main objective is to turn the company's professionals into the protagonists of innovation. Two editions have already been organized, where projects related to energy efficiency solutions, power grid analytics or Marketplace for the promotion of renewables in rural environments have reached the final.