Schneider Electric South Africa has announced the availability of PowerStruxure, a comprehensive family of power management solutions for industry, buildings, data centres and other large energy users. It is one of the key sub-systems contributing to the EcoStruxure promise of up to 30% savings on capex and opex.
PowerStruxure solutions deliver increased operational and cost efficiency, while simultaneously improving power quality and reliability by combining hardware, communication devices, protocols and intelligent software in an optimised reference architecture. PowerStruxure solutions empower stakeholders, from finance to operations, to manage and unify all aspects of power management throughout one or multiple facilities.
PowerStruxure is a tested, validated and documented family of solutions that delivers the intelligence needed to support a complete EcoStruxure energy and management architecture, from the shop floor to the boardroom. The entire PowerStruxure range is designed to leverage companies’ current investment in their existing systems through active, real-time monitoring and control of power infrastructure and energy use across facilities. Thanks to this new range, Schneider Electric SA is able to provide its customers with configured solutions to consolidate all required energy-related inputs.
“Businesses run on energy, so energy usage has a significant impact on the bottom line. Today’s economic and environmental challenges are increasing, and organisations of all kinds are taking a very close look at how they purchase and use energy in their facilities,” says Gys Snyman, vice president energy efficiency at Schneider Electric SA.
“PowerStruxure goes beyond traditional energy management parameters and aligns power and business strategies, giving electrical and site managers the tools they need to help them understand the true drivers behind efficiency, reliability and costs. In turn, this helps corporate finance officers, energy programme directors and facility or plant managers collaborate on decisions, and share best practices that will sustain savings, and maximise productivity.”
As one key sub-system of EcoStruxure, PowerStruxure supports and integrates easily into its comprehensive energy management strategies. Solutions are highly scalable, letting customers take advantage of modular components to add to or upgrade systems as required. It integrates power data from across the enterprise, for example capturing power quality events, filtering and correlating them to help personnel quickly isolate conditions that may be a risk to reliability, causing production disruptions or equipment damage.
EcoStruxure integrated system architectures are supported by StruxureWare software, helping companies drive business performance while conserving enterprise resources, delivering maximum enterprise efficiency from shop floor to top floor. StruxureWare is an open and scalable software platform, ready to expand to complementary functions as companies’ efficiency needs grow.
StruxureWare incorporates seven key functions and PowerStruxure software provides two of these: ‘Power Availability’ to control facilities in real-time at the site level and ‘Energy Management’ to optimise all energy (water, air, gas, electricity, steam) across multiple sites.
The first software suite, StruxureWare for Data Centres, was introduced in June 2011 and other StruxureWare suites for buildings and industry will be introduced during 2012.
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