Schneider Electric and Microsoft Advance AI-Driven Industrial Automation with Green Hydrogen Breakthrough

Schneider Electric, an energy technology company, is deepening its collaboration with Microsoft to help make it easier for industrial companies to modernise their operations, break free from proprietary legacy systems and deploy AI-powered automation at scale.

At the heart of this collaboration is a conviction that industrial automation is overdue for the same open, software-driven transformation that reshaped enterprise IT. Today, most factories and energy plants still run on hardware-locked control systems that are expensive to update, slow to adapt and difficult to extend with Industrial AI. Schneider Electric is building the technology that showcases a better alternative.

In collaboration with h2e POWER, an Indian green hydrogen pioneer, the two companies have deployed India’s first fully autonomous solid oxide electrolyzer system, empowering operators to shift their focus from routine monitoring to more strategic, high-impact work. The system has surpassed 6,000 hours of stable operation in part- and full-load conditions and has demonstrated just-in-time predictive maintenance and promise in cutting electricity consumption by up to 10 percent, in a process where electricity accounts for more than 70 percent of total hydrogen production cost.

The Schneider Electric collaboration with Microsoft combines Schneider Electric’s role as a global energy technology partner and pioneer of open, software‑defined automation with Microsoft Azure cloud, AI and edge infrastructure. The goal is a practical, vendor-neutral path for industrial companies to modernise without scrapping existing investments or halting production.

Central to this is the Industrial Copilot, which extends intelligence to the edge using Microsoft Azure’s cloud and AI services approach for local inference and reinforcement. It automates the engineering tasks that slow modernisation most: writing control logic, configuring systems and navigating documentation. Engineering teams using it report up to 50 percent time savings, with production line changes that once took weeks now completed in hours.

Underlying everything is Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure Automation Expert, the world’s first open, software-defined automation platform. By separating software from hardware, it lets customers run and reuse their automation applications across different equipment, vendors and generations of infrastructure. Microsoft Azure provides the secure cloud and edge backbone that connects it all, from individual sensors to enterprise dashboards.

Together, the two companies are offering something the industrial world has lacked: a migration path that meets organisations where they are, not where they “should be.”

Green hydrogen is central to global decarbonisation plans; however, producing it cheaply and reliably at scale remains a challenge. Solid oxide electrolyzers (SOECs) offer the highest efficiency of any hydrogen production technology, but their operating conditions are so demanding that it has been difficult to maintain equitable net energy consumption and operate them autonomously.

h2e POWER, an India-originated green tech company based in Pune with operations in India, Germany and the USA, had exactly this challenge. Its SOEC system is technically superior, but limited real-time visibility and the absence of open, scalable automation were pushing operating costs well above design targets.

Working with Schneider Electric, they deployed a new AI-powered control solution on h2e POWER’s 20 kW SOEC system. The solution continuously monitors and adjusts the electrolyzer in real time, managing thermal balance, hydrogen flow, energy inputs and safety and equipment health, remotely. 

The results speak to both the technology and the collaborative approach. Energy efficiency improved, stack wear was significantly reduced, and the levelized cost of hydrogen, the industry’s key economic metric, fell by up to 10 percent, equivalent to around Euro 500,000 per year for a typical 10 MW plant. The system has now run for more than 6,000 hours, making it one of the most durable autonomous electrolyzer demonstrations in India, and probably anywhere in the world.

Siddharth Mayur, Founder and Managing Director, h2e POWER, said, “SOECs have always offered unmatched efficiency, but true commercial scale depends on sustainable operations, optimised energy consumption, durability, predictive maintenance and remote, autonomous control. With Schneider Electric’s open software‑defined automation and Microsoft’s AI capabilities powered by Azure, our systems are becoming smarter, more responsive, safer and dramatically more scalable. This open architecture also means we can redeploy intelligence across our entire installed base across multiple locations, without the lock‑in that has constrained industrial innovation for decades.”

Dayan Rodriguez, Corporate Vice President, Manufacturing and Mobility, Microsoft, said, “What we’re seeing at h2e POWER shows the future of industrial automation. The system is powerful and built to scale. Enterprise dashboards unify data across every site, machine learning improves with every hour of operation, and open standards make the control logic fully portable.”

Gwenaelle Huet, Executive Vice President, Industrial Automation at Schneider Electric, said, “Every CIO and plant leader asks the same question: can software‑defined automation truly perform under real‑world industrial conditions. At h2e POWER, the answer is clear. Industrial leaders don’t need another vision; they need a migration path. Our collaboration with Microsoft and the Industrial Copilot delivers exactly that, proving even the most complex energy systems can run as intelligent, autonomous assets.”