#FIS2023 | Lucian Enaru: Schneider Electric is actively involved in sustainability

On the second day of Foreign Investors Summit 2023, Lucian Enaru, Country General Manager at Schneider Electric, provided a comprehensive overview of the company’s role in advancing sustainability and technology in Romania, particularly in the context of data centers and cybersecurity. 

“This area of sustainability is a hot area. And we see the demand from our partners and clients who come from this area. Schneider Electric, in addition to the international recognition it has received in recent years in terms of sustainability, we are recognized and have been recognized as a champion of sustainability. 

Schneider Electric reports daily, quarterly, in detail, those parameters that are related to sustainability, so not only do we report them, but we also monitor the progress, and we also want to see a positive progress.  A few days ago,  a new legislative code has been implemented in Romania, the Romanian Code of Sustainability. At last, we also have in Romania the possibility to report and to follow, at a local level, a clear methodology. It is true that it is aligned with European standards or with sustainability requirements at a global level, but we can have a guide at the moment and we can monitor and report according to standards.

In the next period it will be very interesting to see the evolution of these reports. It is true that they will be mandatory from 2025, so we have a year, 2024, at our disposal, to prepare ourselves. Schneider Electric is actively involved in the sustainability story. When it comes to technologies that help, such as automation, energy efficiency, solutions and especially services in the energy sector. If we want to report, we need to have data. The first step to report something is to measure. The next step is to automate, to make it more efficient and, not last, we need to make this data management.

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What do we do with this data? How do we interpret them? Where do we interpret them? At the moment, the players in the market, whether we are talking about a player in the real estate, retail, industry field, they have access to ultra-performance technologies, which start from the bottom level of the products, equipment, interconnected, go further into the control area and end up in the cloud area, where there are sophisticated software solutions that allow the analysis of all these data, their interpretation and interaction in real time with the users of these applications.

I think a very interesting and very challenging period will follow, especially since we have funding available. There are European funds, state aid, private investments, public investments. And because today we are in a field where we are talking about foreign investments, I am happy to see in the last period in Romania foreign investments, which not only propose to create new objectives or bring new technologies into the market, they propose to install or implement objectives, net zero. 

Apart from the specific financing schemes, there are financing schemes in various industries. Apart from facilitating easier access to European funds, we see the renewable energy zone that is developing in Romania, and Romania, from this point of view, has become an attractive regional player. Why? Because to build a sustainable business, a net zero objective, it is not enough to take only me into account as a player or as a producer. I have to take into account the entire ecosystem around me, all suppliers, from energy suppliers, raw materials suppliers, equipment suppliers, technology suppliers.

In the end, they integrate everything into the sustainability matrix and can prove that they are net zero, but only by bringing together all these players and all the components. At the moment we are in the stage in which we have started to collect data, we have started to interpret them, but they have to be stored somewhere. They have to pass through certain equipment and the software platforms have to be supported by these data centers. There are obviously global data centers, there are big players that we all know from the market, there are regional data centers and obviously there are also local data centers. In Romania, there are such data centers.

There are data centers both in the public and private sectors. The health sector, for example, is a major user of these data centers and we are happy that we can contribute through the technology we have at these data centers. The big problem of implementing all these projects is the speed of implementation and when we talk about sustainable projects or integrated projects, we are talking about the data center. In any field of activity, we have to rely on a data center. Why? Because at the moment, any investment, or almost any investment, is a smart investment. There are automated equipment, integrated equipment, they communicate between them, they make decisions, they store data and then they conduct production flows or buildings in various areas.

All this data must be stored somewhere and must be accessed somehow. The most convenient and easiest way to access this data is the cloud. Very few companies now use local servers or if they are local servers, they are backup servers or servers with functions that are limited. When we talk about cloud, Romania at the moment accesses a large amount of data and we have a great competitive advantage in the region which represents the bandwidth. In the field of the internet, Romania is very well positioned and that is why it is attractive for foreign investments. On the one hand, the labor force, let’s say, is very well educated, but on the other hand, the infrastructure of data centers is very well developed. 

Schneider Electric is involved in almost all data center projects in Romania through the Secure Power division and besides the efficiency part, let’s say, the sustainability component, we are able to bring the latest technologies in the field of cybersecurity. Because it is not sustainable if it is not safe. And this part of cybersecurity is increasingly demanded by our clients and partners. Not last but not least, in data centers, but also in other fields, we are talking about availability. 100% availability is a demand in transport, in aviation, in health, in transportation, in the transportation sector. The big data centers that support capital markets.”