On 4–5 November 2025, Damian Bevan attended the annual European Utilities Telecom Council (EUTC) conference in Brussels to present on the EU Horizon project; SUSTAIN-6G, of which Real Wireless is a consortium partner. His session explored the evolving communications needs of the electricity grid and what new networking capabilities the utilities sector may need to standardise in future 6G systems to support long-term, forward-looking requirements.
The conference opened at the European Parliament, hosted by MEP Pilar del Castillo. From the outset, three themes dominated discussions: resilience (including cyber resilience), spectrum and AI.
Damian summarises the key take aways:
Resilience: Insights from the Iberian blackout
During the conference, the resilience theme was focused on through a discussion and presentation of the recent electrical power outage on the Iberian Peninsula, and the rapid and successful ‘black start’ which brought the Spanish and Portuguese grids back up in less than a day. A ‘black start’ is a bit like an extreme version of the game ‘snakes and ladders’ (without the ladders), whereby if one step is unsuccessful you need to shut everything down again and go right back to the beginning. It is potentially harmful if this happens too often, because if the battery backup for your telecoms network runs down, then substation sites can no longer be restarted remotely. Sending personnel to sites presents logistical and safety issues, especially during widespread outages. During the blackout, Iberian utilities found that maintaining access to critical voice communication systems, particularly LEO satellite phones, was essential, as these could continue operating reliably throughout the entire blackout period.
One advantage that the grid operators had during the Iberian blackout was no significant physical damage to their electrical or telecoms equipment. This may not necessarily be true in the cases of disasters such as hurricanes, floods or conflict for example.
A perspective from Ukraine
There was a live online presentation from a partner in Ukraine (DTEK group). He described how his colleagues are dealing with a network which is literally under attack in both the cyber and physical domains, and how they are striving to (in his words) ‘Fight for Light’ for their customers. He said that sourcing replacement parts and other help from Western partners, some of whom were represented in the room, is much appreciated. He is hoping for further cooperation and integration of the Ukrainian grid with its western neighbours as time goes on.
The discussions on Spectrum
On the subject of radio spectrum, there were presentations and discussions of some European nationwide rollouts in the UHF band around 400-500MHz, which has good coverage characteristics, principally within Ireland and Germany.
With this dedicated spectrum, utilities can build their own private wireless networks which incorporate resilience by design. However, public cellular networks can also be of interest to utilities, even if considered individually they are less resilient than a private network. However, if SIM cards allowing roaming across all (typically three) national public networks are available, as is the case in Germany then resilience can be improved.
Managing tens or even hundreds of thousands of public network SIM cards was highlighted as an issue, which is where private networks could sometimes have additional benefits, at least as regards the network core. So, for example, utilities may find it beneficial to share the RAN to reduce each utility’s capital and operational costs but have their own dedicated 4G or 5G core and thereby more easily manage outstation User Equipment SIM cards, among other potential benefits.
The future is AI?
AI is a hot topic in the utilities space, just as it is almost everywhere else in both commercial and everyday life. EUTC has launched a ‘task force’ to investigate AI in alliance with its counterpart organisations in North America (UTC) and South America (UTCAL), the output of which is a white paper entitled ‘Artificial Intelligence in Electric Utilities: Enhancing Safety, Efficiency, Reliability and Customer Service’, published July 2025, which they jointly reported upon in a special conference session.
The task force has investigated AI use cases, such as customer support, predictive maintenance, smart meter installation quality validation and weather analysis. which have already been trialled or rolled out within utility companies in their everyday operations. The report also went on to consider additional and even more forward-looking use cases.
Looking ahead
Overall, the EUTC conference event was a great opportunity to participate in utilities ‘networking’, in both senses of the word, and to become further immersed in this particular telecoms arena.
Real Wireless looks forward to continuing to investigate these topics through modelling and techno-economic analysis of reference scenarios within the SUSTAIN-6G programme, in collaboration with consortium partners such as Siemens and EDF.
