Grid of the Future

Schneider Electric held a press conference at PowerGen to release its vision for the grid of the future along with some supporting products. This is aimed at the energy transition and helping to meet the set target of removing 10 Gigatons a year of CO2 for the next 10 years.

Schneider offers a serious of EcoStruxure for Power and Grid products and services.. These are primarily aimed at the utility industry and include services for distributed energy resources (DER), grid optimization, as well as new platform-as-a service offerings wherein the utility leaves all data center building, operations, and maintenance to Schneider. In this way, the utility gained access to the latest software and updates without having to upgrade its systems or purchase more. Everything is rolled into the subscription. The idea is to allow the utility and focus on its core competencies as opposed to becoming mired down in IT.

Schneider is offering these cloud services in partnership with Microsoft Azure. The term Energy-as-a-Service is being used for these services. But as one spokesperson pointed out, utilities have been in that business for more than a hundred years. The latest stage is greater digitalization.

In this model, Schneider will incur all capital costs and will own the equipment. Several utilities have already signed on to services such as:

• Grid Operations Platform as a Service.
• SureSeT MV switchgear with the EvoPacT circuit breaker.
• Grid to Prosumer approach to the lifecycle of DER management with simple to complex workflows.