Sign in Subscribe
Electric utilities

Schneider Electric and PG&E Collaborate on Microsoft Azure to Enable a Clean, Reliable Energy Future

Strategic Insights

— 2 min read

Schneider Electric, a global leader in energy management and automation, and Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), a utility company serving Northern and Central California, have announced a collaboration to deploy a distributed energy resource management system (DERMS) on Microsoft Azure. This solution aims to maximize the value of electric vehicles, solar, and battery energy storage as flexible grid resources, ensuring a clean and reliable energy future.

Key Takeaways:

  • The collaboration between Schneider Electric, PG&E, and Microsoft aims to develop and launch a DERMS strategy that integrates, analyzes, and optimizes data from distributed energy resources (DER) such as solar, electric vehicles, battery energy storage, and microgrids.
  • The DERMS technology provides greater visibility into DER behavior and the ability to control DER intelligently, enabling the dispatch of these technologies when California needs energy most.
  • PG&E has connected more than 700,000 customers with rooftop solar to the electric grid and has installed battery energy storage systems totaling more than 500 megawatts (MW) of capacity.
  • The company has contracts for battery energy storage systems totaling more than 3,000 MW to be deployed over the next few years and plans to prepare the grid to power and support three million electric vehicles by 2030.
  • The collaboration builds on Schneider Electric's 30-year co-innovation relationship with Microsoft and demonstrates the power of a unified team with diverse talents and expertise working collaboratively to achieve a new utility-industry standard for integrating DER at scale.
  • Schneider Electric's DERMS strategy, ranked the #1 DERMS solution in 2022 Guidehouse Insights Leaderboard, offers a variety of capabilities, including real-time visibility into all DER, system capacity for peak summer days, local capacity for new service connections and interconnections, reliability and resilience with energy storage, and transportation electrification.

Statistics:

  • PG&E serves more than 16 million people across 70,000 square miles in Northern and Central California.
  • The company has connected more than 700,000 customers with rooftop solar to the electric grid.
  • PG&E has installed battery energy storage systems totaling more than 500 megawatts (MW) of capacity.
  • The company has contracts for battery energy storage systems totaling more than 3,000 MW to be deployed over the next few years.
  • PG&E's vehicle-to-everything (V2X) pilots offer incentives to help customers access new bidirectional charger technology to use their car battery to power their home and send stored power back to the grid on high demand days.
  • By 2030, PG&E plans to prepare the grid to power and support three million electric vehicles.

Sources:

  • M2 PressWIRE, July 31, 2023: "The Backbone for a Clean, Reliable Energy Future: Schneider Electric and PG&E Announce Solution on Microsoft Azure to Maximize Value of EVs, Solar and Battery Energy Storage as Flexible Grid Resources"

Read more