To understand the movement of the microgrid industry, its instructive to watch it’s large players, particularly, right now, Schneider Electric. The company has been navigating the industry’s tributaries for the last five years and seems to be signaling it sees an ocean ahead.
The signal came in the form of Schneider’s mid-August announcement of a new company it has formed with Huck Capital, a San Francisco-based private equity firm focused on clean energy. What’s noteworthy is the partnership’s customer base. It’s targeting microgrids for small to medium-sized buildings, those with an electrical load under 5 MW. Schneider has identified this as a massive market, representing 90% of buildings in the US and Canada.
Pursuing this customer base marks a demarcation from Schneider’s Alphastruxure play, a company it launched last year with the Carlyle Group to bring microgrids to airports, ports and other large infrastructure projects, such as the John F. Kennedy airport modernization. Where Alphastruxure pursues the big and few, the new company wants to serve many.
So with the formation of the new company, yet to be named, Schneider suggests that it sees a big expansion in the pool of likely microgrid candidates. Not so long ago that pool was much smaller, limited mostly to campuses and military bases.
To be clear, Schneider is not the only company going after the small-to-medium building market. Many others, particularly smaller niche players or those with specialized technologies, have been installing microgrids within this size scape, among them Bloom Energy, Enchanted Rock and Powersecure.
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But the move by Schneider is significant because of the company’s size and market clout — Schneider has 135,000 employees worldwide and annual revenue of over $27 billion. The company has used its sizable resources to both navigate its way through the microgrid market and nudge it forward.
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