Global current

As a global specialist in energy management with operations in more than 100 countries, Schneider offer integrated solutions to make energy safe, with power and control, reliable, with critical power & cooling, efficient, with energy efficiency, productive, with industrial, building and home automation and green, with renewable energy solutions across multiple market segments. We have leadership positions in energy and infrastructure, industrial processes, building automation, and data centres/networks, as well as a broad presence in residential applications. With ¤19.6bn sales in 2010, our 100,000+ employees are committed to help individuals and organisations “make the most of their energy”.

The smart grid
To continue to efficiently balance supply and demand, the grid needs to become smarter. How do we make the Smart Grid happen? Today’s grid functions are organised in a top-down way. Tomorrow’s smart grid will be bi-directional: electricity will flow out of homes and offices as well as into them. Presently, centralised, supplier-controlled power is fed into the grid based on consumption predictions and then adjusted at the margin according to peak demand. In the future, demand and supply will interact intelligently in an efficient, decentralised interoperable grid. Currently, intermittent renewable generation is not always efficiently integrated. However, smart grids are approaching efficiently integrating intermittent energy from both renewable power plants and decentralised distributed renewable generation.

At present, providers must come and check meters on a regular basis. Ultimately, consumption data may transfer automatically, giving proconsumers and utilities a real-time estimate of electricity consumption. Most people don’t know how much electricity they consume until they get their electricity bill. Yet in the future, consumers will be able to adjust their energy demand to moments when prices and demand are at their lowest. At the moment, the causes of power cuts have to be manually identified on the grid. However, software is imminent that will detect where cables or equipment are damaged, making blackouts, which carry such a high economic cost, much rarer.

Smart-Grid ready
At Schneider Electric, we believe that there can be no smart grid until all connected players are smart-grid ready. We believe that energy efficient buildings and facilities, together with active end-users will drive smarter demand, which will help push smarter supply, and bring a faster development of the smart grid. This is why we are helping all our customers on the network to be smart-grid ready, by providing them with smart grid enabling solutions for energy management and energy efficiency, demand-side management, flexible distribution and renewable energy integration. And because smarter grids represent such a major change for the electricity network, it is creating a totally new business environment.

In addition to traditional technology providers, energy producers and suppliers, smart grids also bring together active end-users, facility managers, small and large renewable energy producers, energy traders and aggregators, IT enterprise integrators and data management suppliers. This is why we support smarter interactions for a smarter grid – we not only connect our customers to the smart grid, but also connect them with each other. Facilitating these new connections, bringing value to these new relationships, is what will allow our customers to fully leverage the huge business opportunities of a smarter grid – and to mitigate the risks. And because we all recognise that smart grids are a whole new, complex space, we are collaborating and partnering with other, complementary providers – in particular IT enterprise integrators, which are playing a major role in making the grid smarter.

Together, we will experiment in new technology and business models, to create fresh opportunities for our customers, to add intelligence in every part of the network. New demand and supply-side management capabilities are just around the corner. ‘Software as a service’ will offer everything from data exchange, price signal and demand event response management, to 24/7 market and demand monitoring, carbon tracking, reporting and market monitoring. Together, we will make today’s grid greener, more efficient, more stable, easier to navigate – and smarter.