Schneider Electric provides an open automation platform for eco-friendly hydrogen power plants to improve operational efficiency.

Schneider Electric, a global company in the energy management and automation sector, announced on the 18th that it has supplied its open automation solution, EcoStruxure Automation Expert (EAE), to German pump specialist Wilo.

Through this collaboration, Schneider Electric has provided Willow’s hydrogen plant with its full EcoStruxure solution, including process automation, power and EAE, an open software-defined automation platform.

Willow, a premium pump and pump system supplier, operates a hydrogen power plant that converts solar, wind and hydro power into eco-friendly hydrogen through electrolysis.

Schneider Electric said, “Willow’s hydrogen plant required a scalable and flexible distributed system for integration and centralized management of various energy sources.”

Schneider Electric's EAE is the world's first open automation solution based on the IEC61499 international standard. This allows you to model and deploy software applications independently of the underlying hardware infrastructure, enabling you to build software-centric automation applications.

Schneider Electric said, “This solution is highly open and compatible, and engineers can improve work efficiency by automating time-consuming manual tasks and eliminating redundant work,” and “This can reduce the time it takes to perform existing automated tasks by two to seven times.”

“This will allow Willow to produce up to 10 tons of green hydrogen (gH2) per year and store up to 520 kg of hydrogen,” it said. In addition, it has improved sustainability by decarbonizing the hydrogen plant’s backup power supply and increased commercialization capabilities for industrial decarbonization.

“With Willow’s hydrogen power plant powered by Schneider Electric’s EAE, we are laying the foundation for a decentralized renewable energy supply network,” said Oliver Hermes, Willow CEO. “In particular, we are demonstrating how a company can contribute to climate protection and sustainability through a variety of technologies that use open, future-oriented solutions.”

Meanwhile, Willow is a member of Universal Automation. Org (UAO), which was established to realize the spread of open automation, and is jointly developing shared source software for industrial automation. Based on the IEC61499 standard that defines the separation of software from hardware, UAO aims to share the runtime engine, which is an automation software component, across automation technologies regardless of the specific brand of the supplier.