GridVerse – Enel Grids' approach to the metaverse

GridVerse is an open vision of the metaverse combining Enel Grids’ expertise on digital twins with its experience in collaborations.

“GridVerse is a virtual place with a model of our assets where collaborations may be made to create business cases,” Fabio Veronese, Head of Digital Hub at Enel Grids, announced in exclusive interviews and a presentation at Enlit Europe.

“We have a lot of experience on digital twins and on collaborations and a mix of the two in the form of a collaborative digital twin is where the metaverse for energy – what we call the GridVerse – comes in.”

While for many the concept of the metaverse is still rather nebulous and based primarily on social platforms such as Facebook, Enel among other energy companies envisages it as the next step of its digital evolution.

“For us, the GridVerse can be regarded either as the instantiation of the metaverse in the grid or the evolution of the digital twin – they are the same.”

Veronese comments that conditions for the GridVerse are the generally agreed attributes of a metaverse that it is a virtual world for shared experiences that is interoperable and persistent.

Thus the GridVerse, which is built with an architecture of multiple technologies, is based on open protocols, rather than the proprietary approach of for example Microsoft’s enterprise product Mesh or Meta’s socially orientated Horizon Worlds (Facebook).

This then opens the way for numerous use cases of interest for the energy sector in the areas of marketing, communications, digitalisation and engineering.

GridVerse use cases

Turning to Enel Grids' development of the GridVerse, Veronese says that the company has so far implemented a digital twin on the metaverse architecture on Enel’s digital platform.

Use cases for which it is enabled include 3-D representation for remote assistance to field workers and for remote testing, virtual assistance for worker safety and virtual training.

“But if we agree on the architecture there is room for much more as the use cases can be evolved. Examples include augmented gamification or next-generation engineering such as digital twin simulations and 3D analytics, which is very important for gaining operational improvements for utilities,” he says.

“But to do this one needs a platform that allows one to insert and substitute pieces of software when they change or evolve and that is open to enable participation by other contributors to the metaverse stack.”

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Enel Grids’ vision for an open protocol metaverse

Veronese concluded outlining Enel Grids’ vision for an open protocol metaverse.

“We leverage on our topology database to create the location and we have built a 3D representation of secondary substations and transformers and the idea is to put them in a trust platform to give them consistency and identity,” he says.

Enel Grids is currently developing an instantiation of the digital twins on the virtual spaces with the idea to create a system of systems to enable the development of the specific use case of collaborative secondary substation design.

“This is not a future technology but something that can be done now and starting from this kind of metaverse stack which is open enables everyone to participate,” he says.

He adds that one can also then think of use cases that are not only intra-DSO but also inter-DSO, with the open representation of the network or assets independent of the country of location of the DSO.

“This will enable interaction between users of the same use case in different DSOs and also will leverage interoperability between the DSOs.”