Schneider Electric has added a new Grid Operations Platform as a Service to its EcoStruxure platform, which has been designed to address the demands of critical energy infrastructure for the energy industry.
Backed by Microsoft Azure’s open cloud computing platform, the offering provides a deployment environment for grid planning operations solutions to be hosted and managed in the cloud.
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Schneider says the service has been built as an answer to the challenges that grid operators face today, enabling simplified deployments, incremental enhancements, increased scalability, reduced maintenance, as well as facilitating managed and advisory services.
“Microsoft’s commitment to this collaboration is helping drive digital transformation for people, organisations and the industry at large” commented Alexis Grenon, SVP Digital Grid at Schneider Electric. “Together we are working to help our customers manage more reliable, efficient, sustainable and secure grids today and into the future.”
Building on Schneider’s history of delivering asset management and edge management cloud solutions to utilities, the firm is extending its capabilities to operations management.
New EcoStruxure DERMS (distributed energy resource management systems) and ExoStruxure ADMS (advanced distribution management system) run on Azure and include use cases such as distributed energy resource (DER) management, outage management, grid planning, and user training, to help enable smaller organisations to realise the same benefits as larger ones.
With the addition of its new Grid Operations as a Service platform on Azure, Schneider says it is aiming to support the growth of distributed energy resources, microgrids, energy communities, and other flexible resources across digitally planned, designed and operated lifecycles.
“Microsoft is supporting Schneider Electric in delivering business solutions that allow customers to focus more on their operations and less on managing software infrastructure,” said Darryl Willis, Corporate Vice President, Energy Industry at Microsoft.
“This further enables Schneider Electric to address the utility industry’s most pressing business challenges with the flexibility, reliability and security of Azure."
