Telecommunications Engineer (MEng) · Member of the COIT
For seventeen years I have run an electricity distribution network from the inside, with cybersecurity and telecommunications in the same pair of hands.
I am head of smart grids at Aduriz Distribución, the distribution company of the Electra Aduriz group, in the Merindades district of Burgos, Spain. I joined in 2009 as a network technician and I am still here. The role covers the operation of the electricity grid, the telecommunications infrastructure that supports it, and the cybersecurity of both. In a small company those three things are not split between departments: they are solved at the same desk.
That means programming the protection relays of a substation in the morning, validating an IEC 61850 link in the afternoon and reviewing a SOC alert at night. And being on call, because a fault does not wait for office hours.
My background has an unusual trait: I know the electricity grid and the data network from inside the same place. Most industrial cybersecurity specialists came from IT and learned the power sector from the outside. I did it the other way round, with my hands on the installation.
A modern distribution grid is a data network that also happens to carry energy. The meter communicates, the substation communicates, the protection relay communicates, and all of it has to arrive in one place in good order and mean something. I work across that whole chain: from the equipment in the field to the network model and the screen where decisions get made.
→ Swipe the diagram to see it in full
Cybersecurity is not one more layer sitting on top: it cuts across all four, because a vulnerability in a field concentrator compromises just as much as one in the control server.
The electricity grid was digitalised before anyone thought about protecting it. Today every remote control unit, every metering concentrator and every relay with an Ethernet port is a door, and many of those doors were installed when the only concern was that the data should arrive.
My job is to close those doors without switching off the grid. That constraint changes the trade completely: in an OT environment you cannot reboot a device because a patch is due, or block a protocol because it looks suspicious, or shut down a substation to run a test. You have to know the installation to know what can be touched, and when.
That is the part you do not learn on a course: you learn it by having operated the network you now have to defend.
→ Swipe the diagram to see it in full
Every boundary is a point where traffic is inspected and cut back to what operations genuinely need. Moving right you gain criticality and lose room to manoeuvre: in the field there are no maintenance windows.
Between 2023 and 2024 I wrote the syllabus for two modules of the higher vocational programme in telecommunications installations for Universidad Europea. It is work I particularly enjoy, because it forces you to put in order what you learned in a disorderly way, fixing faults.
I am available for online teaching, syllabus development and technical training for companies: electricity distribution and grid digitalisation, industrial communications and OT cybersecurity. I am especially interested in programmes that need someone who has been on the installation, not only in the standard.
I also prepare and deliver content for industry conferences and in-house training in the power sector, where the problem is rarely explaining the technology and usually translating it into decisions a small company can actually take.
ANTICAUSAL — a historical mystery trilogy, published in Spanish and English. Two volumes available, starting with Elcano and the Sceptre of Priam, with the third in preparation.
Vatican archives, geometry, theology and a story that argues about what humanity is here for. Writing long fiction and writing a technical syllabus have more in common than it seems: both consist of holding a structure together over many pages without letting it collapse.
For teaching, syllabus development, technical training, conference talks or expert witness work in the power and telecommunications field.
iban@ibancanton.es