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Schneider Electric, a leader in the digital transformation of energy management and automation, announced the latest innovations and progress towards accelerating grid modernization at DISTRIBUTECH International® 2024, the leading annual transmission and distribution event for utilities, technology providers, and industry leaders. Schneider has also affirmed their leadership in distributed energy resources management with its recognition by Guidehouse Insights as a leader in 2024 for both Grid DERMs and Grid Edge DERMS and #1 in 2023 for ADMS, reinforcing its strength with an industry-leading end-to-end portfolio and ecosystem for grid modernization.
Today's electric grids are facing rapidly shifting market dynamics driven by both supply and demand side innovations that transform the energy value chain from grid to plug. This revolution is underscored by the exponential growth of distributed energy resources—like solar, wind, EVs and microgrids—occurring now and expected in the coming years. To keep up with demand, utilities must digitalize and shift their business model toward more customer services and energy orchestration.
Schneider Electric is advancing grid intelligence and efficiency with its system architecture and ecosystem that is open, interoperable, scalable and IoT-enabled. This extends a history of Schneider being a leading operations platform provider, which is further proven with the latest enhancements and innovations in advanced distribution management from EcoStruxure ADMS, as well as strategic investments, as demonstrated in Schneider’s collaboration with Itron. Collaboration is paramount to solving the emerging challenge to maximize grid capacity in response to the growth of DER and electrification, and utilities are motivated to partner with trusted and innovative technology vendors.
“Schneider Electric is accelerating the world’s decarbonization journey by enabling utilities to deliver resilient, reliable, affordable, and cleaner energy in a more complex energy landscape,” said Scott Harden, Chief Technology Officer, Innovation at Schneider Electric. “With a concerted effort to break down silos and bring an integrated approach to grid modernization and management, Schneider continues to demonstrate its strength through rapid innovations, strategic partnerships, and novel investment strategies, backed by the most comprehensive portfolio for grid modernization and lifecycle management.”
Grid Optimization for Distributed Energy Resources and Distribution Management
Schneider Electric’s Grid to Prosumer portfolio provides secure, end-to-end digitalization with its latest advancements for utilities and prosumers, including:
- EcoStruxure ADMS (Advanced Distribution Management System) delivers new capabilities to boost efficiency, reduce costs, improve reliability and increase grid efficiency. The new ADMS release further solidifies Schneider’s leading position as recognized by Guidehouse Insights and lays the foundation for ongoing innovation for years to come.
- Flexible deployment: modular cloud and on-premise deployment provides the highest flexibility in deploying mission-critical solutions, catering to the evolving cloud business model transformation in the smart grid industry.
- Seamless integration: Native integration with EcoStruxure ADMS, EcoStruxure ArcFM, EcoStruxure DERMS and/or EcoStruxure Energy Transmission Operation adds value with the ability to manage the grid data model in an adaptive, automated way.
- Future-ready and evergreen: Software development kit (SDK) libraries, industry-leading quality, and automated deployment and testing simplify software upgrades and enable extensions by certified partners, expediting software access, deployment and upgrades.
- Harnessing the power of AI: Building on AI use cases for load/generation forecast and load profile generation, the new release delivers more accurate estimated time of restoration (ETR)—leveraging the power of AI to vastly improve grid operations, utility efficiency and customer satisfaction.
- EcoStruxure ArcFM XI, our geographic information systems (GIS) suite of applications offers a map-centric, intuitive way to model, design, maintain, and manage facility and land-based information, and seamlessly integrates with EcoStruxure ADMS for real-time, two-way communication. A recent implementation at a large electric utility showcased over 99% data accuracy, setting the foundation of best practices guiding utilities through a streamlined data migration to Esri's ArcGIS Utility Network.
- ION 7400 facilitates reliable metering and seamless integration of DER assets onto the grid, and has been enhanced with new feature-sets, easily upgradable in the field without any hardware replacement: (1) Advanced: simpler and cost-effective Class 1 PQ panel-mount or DIN rail meter; (2) Essential: offering flexibility to customers to install a cost-effective revenue meter at lower metering points in the energy supply chain, while maintaining the power of ION programmability.
- EcoStruxure Power Automation System with PowerLogic P7 protection relay offers a digital twin to create a virtual representation of a substation that spans its lifecycle for more reliable electrical grids, reduced maintenance costs, and optimized power management. It supports the transformation of today’s electrical grids with greater flexibility to optimize energy from distributed resources and manage the end-to-end lifecycle of the electrical substation.
The Value of Collaboration and Open Systems
Schneider Electric continues to help solve the most complex customer challenges in collaboration with technology partners and portfolio companies and with the strength and breadth of the industry’s broadest ecosystem. With Uplight’s acquisition of AutoGrid, Schneider Electric extends its grid to prosumer momentum for flexibility services, Virtual Power Plants, and prosumer engagement as a single pane of glass solution.
Enterprise projects today typically follow a lengthy playbook for deploying new systems with high upfront costs. But with incremental upgrades and agile deployments, utilities can flip the script and gain immediate value by digitalizing assets and integrating systems in a stepwise approach that lays the groundwork for the future. Schneider went live with EcoStruxure DERMS in collaboration with PG&E last year. Within 2 months from project kickoff, PG&E project team members were utilizing the software and in 7 months the solution was in production thanks to a cloud environment hosted on Microsoft Azure. With Schneider’s cloud-based deployments, utilities can cut time to execute by over 60%.
Schneider is platforming grid software solutions with a data-centric architecture that places data and analysis at the heart of decision-making. Supporting and driving industry standards enables flexibility, interoperability, and security across the architecture, and integration through industry open standards establishes Schneider’s commitment to easing data management—influencing and promoting adoption of distributed energy resources and end-to-end solutions for a digitalized, optimized and modern grid.
