At the 2026 edition of DISTRIBUTECH International, Luca Ferrari, Energy Solutions Manager at Optit, brought to the stage a concrete case of Decision Intelligence applied to energy: the optimisation of A2A Airport Energy’s energy plant at Milan Malpensa airport.
The energy transition won’t be won by electrification alone
A simple but uncomfortable message emerged in San Diego: electrification alone is not enough for the energy transition. The idea of “electrifying everything” (heating, transport, industry) is widespread across the sector, yet today’s power grids, sized for far lower loads, are not ready to support electrification on this scale. For electrification to grow without compromising reliability, we need far more flexible and integrated energy systems, markets and infrastructure.
The key to the energy transition, then, is not a single technology: it is the ability to adapt. And adaptability was precisely the thread running through DISTRIBUTECH International, the event hosted at the San Diego Convention Center from 2 to 5 February 2026, which brought together over 18,000 professionals from 73 countries to discuss the future of energy distribution and transmission.
Europe and the United States: two different approaches to the same problem
Coming from Europe, it is striking to see how differently the two sides of the Atlantic approach the energy transition. In the United States, for example, data centres are treated mainly as static electrical loads, whereas in Europe their waste heat is increasingly harnessed as a resource.
The same gap appears elsewhere: in the US, electricity-centric designs and standalone microgrids prevail; in Europe, multi-energy systems and more integrated network architectures.
The same goal is therefore pursued through different logics, showing that no single model works everywhere: each energy system is its own case and must be optimised for its specific context, respecting its own constraints and particularities.
Our contribution: optimising the energy plant at Malpensa airport
Precisely because each system is its own case, advanced modelling, optimisation and decision support built around the specific case are crucial
This is the approach Optit brought to DISTRIBUTECH, in a talk by our Energy Solutions Manager, Luca Ferrari. Luca presented the work our team carried out on the energy plant at Milan Malpensa airport, operated by A2A Airport Energy.
With OptiEP™, our decision-support solution for energy management, we optimised the plant’s operation and increased its EBITDA by over 21%. A result that shows how, by adapting the tools to the individual system and its constraints, energy complexity becomes a measurable advantage.
Turning complexity into better decisions
Faced with increasingly complex energy systems (an airport as much as a city power grid), the real difficulty is not gathering data, but turning it into the right decision at the right time.
This is exactly what Decision Intelligence does: it integrates mathematics, data science, AI and domain expertise to make adaptability a concrete lever, one you can design, measure and manage.
If your business, too, is rich in data that needs to be interpreted, governed and turned into clear actions that make your company more competitive, let’s talk: meeting that need is at the heart of what we do
