Terranova
Fuelling Innovation in the Utilities Sector

For long Italy has been known around the globe for a label granting fine quality and authenticity. With the rapid advances in technology, the country also takes pride in unlocking untapped opportunities in businesses, keeping up with its legacy of scientific research and technological development. Mixing the iconic Italian aesthetics with technology and innovation, Terranova—one of the leaders in the utilities market—leverages its outstanding know-how to provide its customers with flexible and integrated products. On a mission to help customers with high-quality solutions that exceed market standards and create value over time, Terranova is helping distribution companies and utilities to build a smart utility distribution network with its best-in-class products.

Founded in 2001, the Italy-based company started its journey by delivering solutions in the traditional sector of gas and electricity distribution and selling. With time as the smart city initiatives are gaining more traction, Terranova has forayed deeper into the utilities sector by engaging in smart city-oriented projects and has developed a competent software suite—Smart Network. “Our approach to smart city is the powerful Smart Network software suite that comprises Smart Metering, Smart Grid (TSG), Smart Meter Libraries, and Mobile Applications,” says Elena Bricca, product manager, Terranova.

After consolidating a leadership position in Italy, Terranova accepted an even more demanding challenge: to design and build solutions for international markets, thanks also to the logistics network of Pietro Fiorentini, a multinational company that supplies solutions to the oil and gas industry, with sales of €250 million, which has held a 40 percent stake of Terranova since 2011; and is currently present in more than 80 countries worldwide.

Specifically built for distribution companies, metering management companies, utilities and smart oriented municipalities, Smart Network is a complete solution for the management and configuration of their infrastructure.

To begin with, Terranova helps its clients in implementing Smart Metering applications to manage smart metering across diverse meter brands and services—be it gas, electricity, or water. “Smart Metering allows the distribution companies and utilities to build infrastructure for different services (water, gas, and power), communication technologies and device manufacturers,” adds Elena. The second step involves implementing TSG—the software solution for innovative management of public utility distribution grids such as gas, electricity, water, and associated cathodic protection systems. TSG provides dedicated tools to optimise the use and maintenance of corporate assets, data monitoring, remote reading, and remote control. The multi-service, horizontal, and brand-agnostic TSG brings in metering efficiency and effectiveness by reducing costs connected to physical reading, increasing data collection frequency and reading promptness, and more. TSG also equips users with various functions from telemetry, remote management, diagnostics and alarms, network profiling, to fluid dynamics simulation, network self-balancing, data analysis, and KPIs.

Terranova ensures that its products have the plug-and-play capability with the development of various in-house mobile applications. “This is an important feature to add to our products, as it eliminates the need for utilities to purchase varied software and corresponding devices to conduct their operations,” explains Lucio Machetti, R&D Manager, Terranova. Terranova’s multiplatform and multi-standard interface mobile suite plays an instrumental role in interacting with remote management, remote metering, cathodic protection, and smart meters monitoring devices employed in the field.
The uniqueness of TSG stems from its modularity, scalability, security and field interoperability, reading the most widely-used devices with the possibility to integrate new ones in a short time and a secure manner. To elucidate on the company’s capabilities, Elena shares a recent success story where Terranova contributed to the Life+ 2013 Project called “Life Green Gas Network.” The project aimed to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions caused by the gas leakages at least by 3 percent. Terranova played an instrumental role in the implementation a new remote communications management software between network and control centre, together with a real-time data processing, to optimise the pressure in each sector of the network. “We managed smart devices for the smart grid and succeeded in reducing the emission 6 percent, which is double of what we aimed for,” recalls Machetti.

With such robust functionality and noble goals to achieve, Terranova is actively supporting the world’s transition from disassociated, urban living to a more connected, clean community lifestyle powered via technology.