Spanish grid automation and protection technology company, specialising in distribution grid control, fault detection, and energy cybersecurity.
ZIV Aplicaciones y Tecnología is a Spanish technology company based in Zamudio (Basque Country) specialising in power grid automation, protection systems, and smart grid solutions. Their core work involves distribution grid control — specifically the detection and location of faults, management of islanding operations, and automation of grid responses in real time. In EU research projects they contribute technical expertise in grid flexibility services and energy forecasting, applying their industrial knowledge of how distribution networks actually behave under stress. More recently they have extended this expertise into cybersecurity for energy data services, reflecting the growing exposure of connected grids to digital threats.
FLEXIGRID directly credits ZIV with keywords covering distribution grid protections, fault detection and location, and islanding operation — all hallmarks of a protection relay and grid automation specialist.
ZIV's role in FLEXIGRID (2019–2023) encompasses grid flexibility services, grid control, and energy forecasting within an interoperable distribution grid framework.
Participation in CyberSEAS (2021–2024) marks ZIV's entry into securing energy data services against cyber threats, extending their grid expertise into the digital security domain.
ZIV's H2020 trajectory runs from core operational grid technology toward the cybersecurity layer that sits above it. Their earliest project work (FLEXIGRID, 2019) is entirely concerned with the physical and logical behaviour of distribution grids — protection schemes, automation, islanding, fault location — the kind of deep expertise that comes from building or operating the hardware itself. By 2021 they had joined CyberSEAS, which shifts the focus to securing the data services that flow through those same grids. This is a logical and deliberate progression: as smart grids become more software-defined and connected, the companies that understand grid behaviour are exactly those needed to define what securing them means in practice.
ZIV is moving toward the intersection of grid operations and digital security — an area of accelerating EU investment — making them a strong candidate for consortia addressing smart grid resilience, critical infrastructure protection, or secure energy data exchange.
ZIV participates exclusively as a consortium partner rather than a project coordinator, positioning themselves as a technical specialist that brings industrial grid expertise into research-led consortia. Their two projects involved large, multi-country partnerships (FLEXIGRID alone was a substantial Innovation Action), suggesting they are comfortable operating within complex consortia where they contribute a defined technical domain. This profile — deep specialist, non-coordinator — is typical of companies whose primary business is industrial rather than research, and it means they bring real-world implementation knowledge that more research-focused partners lack.
ZIV has built connections with 47 distinct consortium partners across 11 countries through just two projects, indicating membership in large, diverse European consortia rather than tight bilateral partnerships. No geographic concentration is visible from the data, pointing to broad European engagement consistent with pan-EU grid and cybersecurity research programmes.
ZIV's base in Zamudio places them inside the Basque Country's dense industrial technology ecosystem, and their keyword fingerprint — fault detection, islanding, distribution protection — points to a company with hands-on, product-level knowledge of how distribution grids fail and recover. Unlike university groups that study grids theoretically, or large utilities that operate them, ZIV appears to occupy the product and systems integration space: the companies that build the relays, controllers, and automation logic that utilities actually deploy. That combination of industrial product knowledge and active EU research participation is relatively rare and directly valuable for consortia that need demonstrable results, not just publications.
