Electricity + Control May 2019

ENERGY MANAGEMENT + ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING

The open, interoperable, IOT-enabled energy management and automation platform EcoStruxure, developed by Schneider Electric, is used in buildings, data centres, industry and infrastructure – currently across 480 000 sites – around the world. First launched in 2009, around the same time as the first smartphone came onto the market, EcoStruxure is evolving to incorporate new technologies, adapt to dif- ferent customers’ requirements and encompass emerging possibilities. Electricity+ Control recently attended a seminar on EcoStruxure as it is now, presented at Schneider Electric’s premises in Midrand, Gauteng. Efficient energy management in industry

Take Note! EcoStruxure provides a platform which uses au- tomation for efficient en- ergy management across different domains.

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Q uintin McCutcheon, Digital Transformation Leader, Anglophone Africa Cluster at Sch- neider Electric, presented an overview of the EcoStruxure architecture and what it offers in- dustry and other customers. Within the company’s focus on delivering safe, reliable, efficient and sustainable power and pro- cess management technologies, in his position McCutcheon is focused, broadly, on “powering and digitalising” the economy across sub-Saharan Africa. “We work on leveraging digitalisation to make power more reliable and to manage energy more efficiently,” he said. EcoStruxure is designed to support these objectives. The system provides a platform which uses au- tomation for efficient energy management across

six domains: Power, IT, Building, Machine, Plant and Grid. These are, in most industry applications, overlapping and integrated rather than distinct dis- ciplines. EcoStruxure encompasses the architecture and platform itself as well as Schneider Electric’s deep expertise in four key end-markets – build- ings, data centres, industry and infrastructure, the EcoStruxure community, and lifecycle tools that extend from design and development to build, operate and maintain, delivering tested, validated solutions for each customer site. The platform The system is structured across different levels of functionality: from connected products, to edge

26 Electricity + Control

MAY 2019