Schneider Electric announced at this week’s Distributech in California the next phase in its Grids of the Future offerings.

North American utilities are facing significant disruption with a climate emergency, talent scarcity and energy crisis, further exacerbated by prosumer revolutions on the demand side. To provide guidance, Schneider Electric has expanded its Grid to Prosumer portfolio to help customers and utilities transform and digitalise their business across the energy value chain.

“Rather than a barrier, this inevitable new energy landscape presents an opportunity for utilities to transform their businesses by reimagining their existing business models, capturing infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act (IIJA) funding, and digitalising the demand and supply sides,” said Gary Lawrence, president of Schneider Electric’s power and grid segment. “We are proud to have a robust and continuously evolving portfolio to serve as a trusted partner in the journey towards Grids of the Future.”

As utilities face complex grid, power generation and energy transition challenges, rapid innovation with agile deployments helps utilities achieve near-term benefits while laying a foundation for bold long-term visions. Adopting a stepwise approach allows utilities to start small and scale over time by initially focusing on the most pressing customer needs and grid locations versus deploying systemwide all at once.

The Grid to Prosumer approach addresses distributed energy resource (DER) management needs across enterprise technology and business processes. An example stepwise journey for DER management starts with modelling and simulation, then incrementally advances to situational awareness, simplified optimisation, advanced optimisation and market integration.

Schneider Electric has made additional investments in Grid to Prosumer with extended offerings that now include home energy management. Schneider Home provides homeowners with energy independence through integrated home energy management controlled by a single, easy-to-use app that automates energy production, storage, measurement and control, making homes efficient, resilient and sustainable.

With a multi-faceted approach guided by a foundation of digital transformation, utilities can integrate with Schneider Home to increase grid flexibility, respond to changing prosumer priorities and optimise across market needs.

Schneider’s grid operations platform-as-a-service was built to address current and future challenges for grid operators, including small to medium utilities looking to modernise. Now EcoStruxure Grid Operation is available as a cloud deployable offering hosted on Microsoft Azure infrastructure. With this agile approach to outage management, grid operators can focus on core business strategies versus maintaining and updating IT infrastructure.

Schneider also announced a joint grid resilience offering with AiDash, which addresses modern day infrastructure and environmental challenges, such as aging power grids, decarbonisation and distributed power generation, vegetation growth inside rights-of-way, and the impact of storms and wildfires. Now, utilities can leverage the analytics to prevent power outages, predict future outcomes and build climate resilience.

Acknowledging the essential role transformers play in today’s energy landscape, Schneider has launched EcoStruxure Transformer Expert, an easy-to-deploy monitoring option for higher RoI. It includes IoT sensors and software analytics that can be leveraged for oil transformers of all ages, regardless of manufacturer. It helps increase operations uptime and operational efficiency, reduce maintenance costs, and extend lifetime by providing full visibility into health status and operations to drive data-driven decisions and optimisation.

PowerLogic T500 is a substation controller for distribution automation in a single, low-power-consuming device. Delivering cyber-security features to reduce business disruption while ensuring peace of mind with certified IEC 62443 SL2 compliance, it is easy to use throughout the product lifecycle and ensures a fully digital experience.

Complete with an intuitive configuration tool and a flexible web-based user interface, PowerLogic T500 is integrated with EcoStruxure System Management data management software that helps reduce electrical faults and downtime by providing operators with the capability of performing maintenance on connected devices in diverse, multi-vendor environments.

Providing support to optimise operations, Schneider’s EcoCare membership offers depth expertise combined with digital capabilities across the equipment lifecycle for decarbonisation and electrification, while EcoConsult delivers consulting expertise and actionable insights for safety, resiliency, efficiency and sustainability. Finally, EcoFit reduces waste to position businesses for the future.