Schneider Electric : Designing All Electric, All Digital Innovations with our Partners for the New Electric World

Today, over three billion people worldwide are connected and are experiencing the acceleration of our digital world. However, the recent and foreseeable global challenges, such as the COVID-19 outbreak and climate change, respectively, demand an accelerated transformation of global economies towards a New Electric World - All Electric and All Digital.

With regards to climate change, the current energy infrastructure transmission would contribute 95% of all emissions by 2040, making a 1.5-degree rise in global temperatures inevitable. This rise in temperature, as per the Intergovernmental Panel on climate change, is expected to have disastrous consequences.

It is therefore imperative to decarbonize electricity production. Also, we would need a network of partners for driving the transition and advance digital technologies for supporting the transition to a resilient new electric world.

Join me in discussion with Annika Moman, SVP, Power and Energy Business, AECOM, and Andrea DONADEL, SVP, Strategy and Innovation, Power Products Division, Schneider Electric, to discuss how we can collectively make this transition.

Annika highlights that the recent pandemic has exposed certain shortcomings in our infrastructures. These shortcomings need to be eliminated by immediate infrastructure modernization while building more resilient and sustainable systems and improving the environmental equity of our infrastructure.

She cites the example of New York State which has a high fossil fuel dependency, especially for powering downstate New York as well as for running the state's heating systems. Consequently, post-COVID19 outbreak, the areas in New York which depended more on fossil fuel combustion experienced higher infection rates and mortality.

However, New York is already leading by example. The state has set carbon emission caps on large NYC buildings, which it plans to achieve by electrification of heating systems, adopting efficiency improvements, and switching to cleaner fuels. NYC is a great local example to understand how energy transitions are driven by electric demand and how demand triggers technology evolutions.

Annika further emphasizes upon the importance of collective efforts and the real intent to achieve efficiency and carbon reduction goals. Multi-stakeholder engagement and leveraging digital technologies have a critical role to play in accelerating this transition across sectors. The transition is to be achieved by helping the relevant stakeholders modernize and digitize their infrastructure with empowering technologies such as those provided by Schneider Electric. These interventions reap high economic, environmental, and social dividends.

While discussing the scaling of such local examples to a larger level, Annika stresses on the importance of showcasing smaller success stories, building community support, and replicating and scaling those models regionally. Backed by enabling technologies, it is possible to create the roadmap to leverage smart ideas into scalable solutions, these solutions will help enable our partners to be more efficient.

Adding to Annika's perspective on our collective duty to build a New Electric World and a zero-carbon future, our co-panelist Mr. Andrea DONADEL shared with us how Schneider Electric is reinventing the future together with our partners.

He emphasized that we, at Schneider Electric, feel it is essential to empower our 650,000 partners per specialization, including specifiers, panel builders, distributors, electricians and others. Towards that end, we have built over the years the MySchneider Partner program which is not only a competitive asset but also a great way to cascade our technologies and competencies through a new digital collaborative platform for which our partners can benefit form.

Schneider Electric is stepping up its endeavors with major innovations that are based on three key pillars - Simple, Collective, and Meaningful.

• By being 'Simple' we endeavor to make complex technologies very intuitive and score high on user experience for partners.
• By making these innovations 'collective', we are trying to make non-exclusive open assets for the benefit of larger community so that it can support scalability.
• Also, in order to add value to our lives with technology that's high on utility, we ensure that these innovations are 'meaningful'.

Today, Schneider Electric has triggered a new revolution by developing 'simple, collective, and meaningful' innovations in the form of our new power products.

The first being the PrismaSeT Active - an industry-first low-voltage switchboard with built-in cloud connectivity and stronger capabilities.

The second being the new generation of ComPacT breakers, which are tailored for operational excellence and have significantly simplified maintenance activities.

These new breakthroughs in innovation are exactly representative of our vision of the New Electric World - All Electric, All Digital.

To learn more about the pioneering energy management innovations and partner programs, be a part of the Innovation Summit World Tour 2020