Disclaimer: This article is published in partnership with Siemens. Siemens is paying for my engagement, not for promotional purpose. Opinions are my own.

Electricity drives us towards a cleaner, more efficient, and more versatile world of energy, a world we need to care about individually to manage finite resources, environments, and inhabitants. The backbone of this move towards a cleaner world requires a safe, modern, efficient, and reliable power supply needs; for this, we need smart electrification.

A summary of a keynote view from Matthias Rebellius

The pressures of globalization, climate change and urbanization will shape how and where we live. In a keynote at Hannover Messe 2021, Matthias Rebellius is a Member of the Managing Board of Siemens AG and CEO of Smart Infrastructure, argues as the world changes at a growing and rapid pace, sustainability will become at the forefront of everyone’s mind.

Sustainability will dominate not just those in advanced countries, presently consuming 30 times more resources than those in developing countries; every one of us will need to become more thoughtful, managing the finite resources we all have around us.

Electrification will allow us to have intelligent power supplies to grow and equally sustain our infrastructures, businesses, homes, and assets. Smart Electrification can enable sustainability through the combination of digitalization and applications.

Matthias goes on to point out we are at a tipping point. It is going to be our ability to accelerate technology to achieve the energy transition we need. The ability to enable our industries to save money, conserve resources, create valuable new efficiencies and do this by reducing the Co2 and achieving greener operations.

As he points out, 35% of our energy consumption is in the industry use. Decarbonization is becoming central to resolve—the need of reducing carbon and replacing it with green solutions based on renewables. We need to combine three levers of decarbonization.

Matthias believes there are three levers for decarbonization.

The first lever is flexibility, tapping into the new technology solutions such as storage solutions and deploying virtual power plants, limiting our resource use.

The second lever will come from digitalization as this will allow us to analyze, pre-empt and manage our industrial assets in more imaginative ways. It provides data that enables different, more valuable insights, predictive analysis, and the ability to scope out existing and future demands.

The third lever is the most important, the one of Electrification. Energy demand is rising as population growth, technology dependence, and increasing reliance on its place in our daily lives continue to grow. How we handle the energy demand is at the core of having successful decarbonization.

Electrification is increasingly important in an automated world.

In Matthias’s view, electrification grows in importance for industries, buildings, and infrastructures. We need to design electricity systems to be versatile, custom-fit and have an adaptable power supply. To achieve this, we first have to intelligently manage the energy supply that comes into the industrial site or our buildings. The second part of designing a new electricity system is how we go about managing energy within or onsite.

The key is finding new, smarter ways for industrial sites or our buildings to interact with the grid in more efficient and responsive ways. Electrification needs a more holistic approach, more sectoral integration where power plants are more adaptable in their power generation and sources. Solutions where photovoltaic systems (solar) and storage interact and can complement a two-way flow of energy design.

Smart Electrification becomes key.

Siemens offers solutions in related hardware, software, and services to integrate power supply solutions into industrial and building automation systems. These solutions enhance and provide increased resilience, asset efficiency and sustainability. Solutions are designed to protect power distribution, provide power quality and the electrical components to integrate this Smart Electrification into the Digital Enterprise.

Their solutions support the entire value chain from planning, engineering, installation, operation, and continuous optimization to transform everyday energy use. Resilience, resource efficiency, and sustainability need the Smart Electrification environment based on flexibility, combined with a comprehensive digitalization approach.

The ability to manage finite resources has in data an infinite friend.

Having software-guided demand management onsite can provide an opportunity for digitalization and deploying Smart Electrification application solutions.

This ability to combine the physical and digital world opens the door for extracting data from IoT devices, sensors, and software deployment. You gain operating insights—growing confidence in greater operational resilience and asset optimization.

By aggregating and analyzing growing amounts of data, you can take the energy system to optimize assets, deploy proactive identification of situations that have been “signalled” as ones that might compromise system efficiency, indicate an earlier warning of possible equipment failure.

Matching your physical assets and operating in the real world with a digital twin becomes a further step in managing your entire power systems. Digital twins combined with industrial automation enables a client to test options, explore different scenario’s, and gain more optimal coordination of system design and services.

Siemens offers a comprehensive portfolio for Smart Electrification.

To achieve this Smart Electrification, Siemens provides a comprehensive range of solutions where they are constantly innovating.

Siemens has recently added 3WA air circuit breakers combining all electrification components’ functions. Greater recorded/integrated data solutions into their industrial automation, IoT and medium-voltage systems, so they provide further optimal protection in decentralized networks. They offer new engineering software in Control Panel Design, new technologies based on SIPROTEC and Reyrolle protection technology, and SICAM energy automation and power quality application for an advanced power supply.

In the digital enterprise approach of Siemens, the energy infrastructure offers design, digitally and intelligently to operate more reliably, sustainably, and efficiently due to this continuous innovation.

The opportunity is how we manage in the future.

How we manage the energy supply is one of the essential factors in decarbonizing industries. Smart Electrification, based on renewables, will be one of the key levers to achieve this transformation. The smart solutions will offer flexible production, lifecycle optimization and performance. The opportunity for a better ecological footprint comes from green energy supply and having an intelligent set of digital solutions to offer a reliable and stable electricity supply.

Reference link to the Electrification offering

https://new.siemens.com/global/en/products/energy/topics/totally-integrated-power/smart-electrification.html