Itron and Schneider Electric announce grid edge integration
Itron and Schneider Electric have announced a collaboration, integrating their intelligent grid and distributed energy resource (DER) management solutions to digitalise the demand and supply of electricity.
The integration of Itron’s grid edge intelligence solutions to Schneider’s digital grid solutions aims to enable grid edge data analysis to optimise grid planning and operations to increase grid capacity while deferring infrastructure investments.
According to the companies, the integration is aimed to improve energy and grid management for utilities as homeowners and businesses increasingly adopt DERs, such as rooftop solar, battery energy storage, electric vehicles and microgrids at the grid edge.
In a joint release announcing the integration, the companies state that with more DERs coming online and more data being generated at the grid edge, the opportunity is provided to harness, aggregate and analyse that data to produce actionable insights for grid management.
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“We began collaborating with Schneider Electric to simplify grid management and enable a new generation of applications for utilities that recognise the dramatic changes and escalating demand that await all of us,” says Don Reeves, senior vice president of Outcomes at Itron.
“This collaboration will help us realise Itron’s vision for the grid edge – one where meters, transformers and feeders negotiate amongst themselves to achieve localised distribution outcomes, dynamically adapting and configuring sections of the distribution grid while enabling consumers to participate and benefit from these transactions.”
Ruben Llanes, NAM Power & Grid Segment president for Schneider Electric adds: “Utilities today need an interoperable, fully connected foundation for intelligent grid operations.”
Itron and Schneider Electric are also working on numerous integrated use cases that will deliver value across asset management, grid planning and operations and DER management and will work with utilities to integrate their solutions.
The partners cite Bloomberg NEF projections that 167 million homes and 23 million businesses will be solar users by 2050.
With the collaboration, they add, utilities can extend energy orchestration to behind-the-meter assets, enabling proactive management of grid constraints when and where needed.
Related Knowledge Center: Offshore wind energy
Over the next decade, U.S. offshore wind power is expected to grow from a single 30-megawatt wind farm off Rhode Island to more than 2,000 MW of capacity along the Atlantic Seaboard. There are contracts for wind power off the coasts of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Maryland, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Virginia.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has estimated the United States has over 4,000 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind potential, enough to power the country four times over.
The growth in part being spurred by state solicitations, including in New York, where then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) set a commitment of 9,000 MW of offshore wind by 2035, and in Connecticut, where in June 2021, Gov. Ned Lamont (D) signed legislation authorizing the construction of 2,000 MW of offshore wind by 2030.
The offshore development is also being driven by an investment tax credit set to end in December 2019 and is equal to 12 percent of expenditures. U.S. Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Tom Carper (D-Del.) have introduced a bill to extend the tax credit for up to eight years.
The Interior Department has held eight competitive lease sales that resulted in 15 offshore wind leases over 1.7 million acres that has the potential for 21 GW of capacity. In February 2022, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management completed a bidding process that realized $4.37 billion for 488,000 acres across six lease areas in federal waters off New York and New Jersey.
Projects have also been proposed off the Southeast coast, off California and Hawaii, and for the Great Lakes.