Schneider Electric: Using a Cloud-based Management Software to Control Lighting Systems at the Portfolio Level

Schneider Electric invested in smart LED lighting upgrades that use networked occupancy sensors, daylight sensors, and 0%-100% dimming capabilities to produce 50% to 90% lighting energy savings. To optimize the savings from these smart LED systems, Schneider piloted an advanced cloud-hosted software that controls the company’s portfolio-wide lighting systems remotely. It provides central visualization of all sites’ lighting energy performance and oversight for proactively resolving maintenance and performance issues. This advanced solution is on track to save 3,000,000 kWh per year, which is 1.3% of the annual electricity consumption of Schneider’s U.S. portfolio of sites, resulting in approximately 4,687,000 pounds of CO₂ emissions avoided.

Schneider leveraged an LED upgrade project at a large manufacturing facility to pilot the new software. Soon after realizing the success of this initial project, they worked with the supplier to develop a business case to transition other sites with similar LED lighting solutions to the new cloud-hosted software. To streamline the funding, approval, and implementation, Schneider sponsored the project at the regional (North America) level. 

Schneider Electric’s objective with this controls project was to eliminate the need for the continual and manual update of lighting schedules and to standardize the control strategy at multiple locations. Additionally, they wanted to shift away from maintaining site-level servers to reduce maintenance costs and move to a cloud-based solution with high reliability and portfolio-wide visibility and control. Figure 1 shows a sample of the savings dashboard available through the software. To ensure data security, the sites were required to enhance their firewalls and internet connections to make the cloud-hosted solution secure per Schneider Electric’s cybersecurity standards. The software implementation was scheduled based on the sites’ readiness to meet these standards. The total implementation cost was $300,000 to transition all 30 sites in North America, with approximately half of this cost going toward improving the IT infrastructure for cybersecurity compliance. Schneider justified the upgrades to their network infrastructure using this project, which will also enable other cloud-hosted solutions to improve energy efficiency in other systems and across their operations. 

Figure 1: Portfolio-Wide Lighting Energy Savings Dashboard  

Figure 2: Sample Site-Level Baseline and Current Energy Consumption Trend 
 

Transitioning to the new software enables Schneider to implement consistent lighting control strategies and best practices across facilities. It eliminated the need for scheduling production overtime, holidays, snow days, etc., by recognizing such events automatically. This also resulted in reduced manual adjustment of schedules by facilities personnel. The new software has a built-in setback feature that automatically controls the light level based on occupancy and a pre-determined delay. The software runs on a new network that can provide more energy-saving opportunities in the future by leveraging occupancy data (as shown in the heat map in Figure 3) from the light fixtures to control other equipment and plug loads. Since the software is cloud-hosted, this also eliminates the need for and cost of maintenance and replacement of on-site servers.

Figure 3: Heatmap with Occupancy and Average Power
 

The previous system was more susceptible to inefficiencies caused by employee turnover and a lack of communication between the Production and Facilities teams.  With the new system’s occupancy sensors placed throughout the workspace, opportunities to leverage the data for more savings’ have been identified. Schneider Electric is currently in the process of implementing a pilot project to use occupancy data from the light fixtures to control fans, plug loads, and air compressors. Savings from this project will enable the business case to expand similar projects across the portfolio.