Power gear company Schneider Electric is fond of saying that 70 percent of the world’s electrons flow through its equipment. But what has it been doing to make those electrons flow more intelligently ? Like fellow smart grid giants such as Siemens, General Electric and ABB, Schneider has a multi-faceted approach, largely based on its strength in low and medium-voltage equipment and its industrial and commercial energy management systems. In particular, managing energy in buildings and connecting them back up to the smart grid looms large in its plans.
Schneider operates in more than 100 countries and reported revenues of €8.57 billion ($11.2 billion) in the first half of 2010, double those of the same period last year. It provides products and services in data centers, industrial facilities, commercial buildings, and in the grid itself. It also has a host of familiar brands — industrial automation from APC , inverters from Xantrex, circuit breakers from Square D, and most recently, the transmission and distribution business units it acquired from French power giant Areva.
So what’s on Schneider’s mind when it comes to the smart grid? Here are some takeaways with recent conversations with company executives, along with a host of projects and partnerships that help define Schneider’s vision:
1) The Smart Grid Needs Smart Buildings. First of all, it’s important to focus on the fact that Schneider is busy building a smart grid from the building on up. Illustrative of the work is Schneider’s partnership with IBM, aimed at linking buildings from individual sensors and controls all the way up to the enterprise.
“Schneider and IBM think you can’t have a smart grid without smart buildings,” is how Chris Davis, vice president of global strategic alliances for Schneider’s buildings business, put it to me. The two have already started one project at Rhode Island’s Bryant University, where they’re linking the school’s Schneider APC-based data center control platform with Schneider’s Andover Controls “Continuum” brand building management system — an example of the advantages of having a huge base of installed equipment ready to be integrated.
A similar strategy is being applied with Schneider’s EcostruXure offering for building energy efficiency, which ties Schneider’s gear and engineering expertise with a variety of services, from “EnergyLite” programs to cut building power use by 10 percent with minimal investment, all the way up to full-scale, multi-million dollar energy services contracts that aim for 30 percent or better efficiency gains. In New York City, Schneider’s TAC energy controls system helped the McGraw-Hill Building at Rockefeller Center cut its energy bill by 60,000 kilowatts, saving $12,500 per month.
Read More : How Schneider Electric is Tackling the Smart Grid Cleantech News «
