Electricity 4.0 is the new energy landscape: Schneider Electric

Energy management specialists Schneider Electric believe we are entering the fourth phase of electricity, where the combination of digital and electric sources create zero waste and zero greenhouse gas emissions.

In a recent roundtable on the subject Louise Monger, vice president digital buildings at Schneider Electric described Electricity 4.0 as the new energy landscape.

“Electricity 4.0 is our fastest route to net zero,” said Monger.

In order to understand the fourth phase of electricity, Monger outlined the first three.

“Electricity 1.0 is the early pioneers so that's, Faraday, Volta, Tesla pioneering and really creating what we know today as electricity. 2.0 is towards the end of the 19th century where we started to see power plants, and mass electrification for lighting, so that people would start to have lighting in their homes. And then 3.0 is the mid-20th century where silicon enabled the development of solar,” she said.

“Now we're in the next phase where we will see digital. And digital is about making things that couldn't previously be seen, tracked or measured, suddenly being seen to organisations.”

Sustainable data centres

According to Monger, Electricity 4.0 encompasses digital technologies and renewable sources to enable sustainable data centres through design, build, operations and maintenance.

“Often people think that sustainability needs to be tackled from the supply point, which is, ‘Oh, we need the wind and the solar,’ but actually, so much more can be done at that consumption point. And we really want to reinvent what is happening in these buildings in this infrastructure.”
Monger said that data centres need to be more frugal, and use less energy than in the past, but also more autonomous and energy efficient for data centre operators.

“Data centres are a segment that have nailed resiliency, it's their core value proposition really is uptime. But, how can we make them even more resilient and able to withstand any outside influence? Hyper efficient, so how do we make it more and more effective to actually manage these portfolios of assets? And lastly, adaptive, how can they be flexible and scale up and down to make the demands and the end-customers’ needs.”