EcoStruxure Power is a digital architecture for energy management in buildings that delivers significantly enhanced value to professionals in the power industry, including contractors, consulting engineers, panel builders and their end customers.
EcoStruxure Power is part of Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure architecture, an open and interoperable system architecture for building, grid, industry, and data centre, customers. It brings together the company’s industry-leading connected products, edge control, apps, analytics and services into a connected and integrated framework for all areas of the power distribution and management chains.
With open integration, real-time operations and analytics and increased levels of cyber security, the next generation architecture enables power users to make the most of the new opportunities created by intelligent devices and digitisation to deliver improved reliability, safety, efficiency, sustainability and connectivity for customers across multiple industries.
“EcoStruxure Power responds to a paradigm shift in the power industry as the energy world is going through more decentralisation, decarbonisation, digitisation and a stronger use of electricity,” said Philippe Delorme, Executive Committee member and EVP, Building & IT Business, Schneider Electric. “We are leveraging advances in IoT, mobility, sensing, cloud, analytics, and cyber security technologies into a set of connected tools for the power management industry. By acting on data in real time from any number of IoT-enabled sources, our customers can improve operational and energy efficiency and bring their operations directly into the future.”
Advances at three levels
EcoStruxure Power provides the industry's most comprehensive portfolio of interoperable and cloud-connected and/or on-premise technologies organised around its three core layers of technology innovation:
- At the base level are connected products that collect and distribute information, including MasterPact MTZ next-generation low-voltage breakers with industry-first embedded Class 1 metering for seamless Smart Panel integration; and PowerTag, the world’s smallest wireless energy sensor. Schneider Electric is shipping every year hundreds of millions of circuit breakers that are getting more and more connected.
- The second level, known as edge control, enables real-time control of operations, either onsite or through the cloud. For example, EcoStruxure Power Monitoring Expert, an open, interoperable and scalable power management software package, allows tracking of real-time power conditions to help improve efficiency and reliability; and EcoStruxure Power SCADA Operation provides fast data-acquisition monitoring while improving the power availability of electrical distribution networks.
- At the third level are apps, analytics, and services that allow customers to make informed and timely decisions to ensure reliability, reduce costs and boost efficiency. For example, EcoStruxure Asset Advisor services deliver predictive analytics to help ensure a company’s critical operations are operating safely and securely through continuous monitoring of critical connected products.
Significant enhancements
In large and critical buildings, uptime is paramount. At many large facilities, for example, power outages can cost more than £1 million+ per day while endangering the lives of employees and visitors. In addition, operations and maintenance costs can represent as much as 80 percent of the total lifecycle cost over a 50-year period. EcoStruxure Power improves power availability and safety in such buildings by monitoring the entire network and boosting protection against shock, fire, and explosion.
In large industrial facilities, reliability is paramount for ensuring productivity and operational efficiency. Moreover, for companies looking to expand, a high level of productivity and efficiency can be the keys that unlock growth. Equipped with the proper data, insight, and optimisation, industrial facilities can ease the cost of expansion and open new avenues of innovation.
One Schneider Electric customer, a paper mill, estimates that it saved over £1 million in the construction of their new co-generation plants. Extensive monitoring, analysis, and control were used to optimise the electrical systems and avoid unnecessary downtime. Thanks to EcoStruxure Power Management software, they could improve site planning and operational reliability for the expansion of their facilities.
In addition, because small and medium buildings usually have limited staff on site, EcoStruxure Power also provides simple cloud-based tools to make it easy to automate more reliable maintenance operations and quickly apply corrective action in case of an outage. For example, facility or property managers can receive automatic outage notifications and monitor energy consumption through a simple dashboard.
One Schneider Electric customer realised 30 percent savings by installing connected panels, monitoring them, and applying corrective actions based on an analysis of the received data. Another customer receives automatic outage notifications for 60 connected facilities and can track energy consumption through a simple dashboard.
“Our customers realise they can unlock new levels of efficiency and create a competitive differentiation by leveraging the new opportunities created by digitisation and IoT,” concluded Delorme. “EcoStruxure Power gives them scalable, measurable, agile solutions to work with and succeed in today’s fastpaced digital world.”