OK, good afternoon, everyone, it's really great to be here. What a privilege for me to be here as a board member of the Atlantic Council, but special privilege to be here to introduce and share with you all the global chairman of Schneider Electric, who fondly goes by JPT, so I'm going to call you JPT if I may, and you have been known as a transformational leader that has turned a hardware-focused electric company into a global leader in automation, digitization, and energy management. You've done this through having your major market here in part in the United States with 22,000 people working in 22 factories across 14 states and a billion dollars of investment. So now you're here and we have the Global Energy Forum and you're looking at this current administration's clear agenda of greater energy abundance, and as you have told me, it's all about the electrons. So, what is electron energy abundance and how do we achieve that mission from your perspective, JPT?
Sherry, it's great to be with you today to speak about this subject, which actually, as you could see this morning during the opening speeches, has become extremely strategic. So some words about Schneider just to understand the frame of what I'm going to say. We are a company that is focused on energy technology and we've been developing that convergence of electrification and digitization for the past 25 years. We operate all across the value chain, all sorts of supplies, 20% of our business in oil, gas, nuclear, renewable, and so on. Then, really important, I think I can't count the number of times we agreed. We mentioned today 10% of our turnover, and then the big growing sector, 25% of our business in data centers and AI today, and that was zero 20 years ago. Today it's one quarter of the company, and then the rest about building and industry on the species serving all the agenda of reshoring. So what you have heard today is that we are back to basics. We rediscovered that energy is absolutely strategic to any country's security, resilience, prosperity, economic growth, and of course it completely serves the priority of the agenda of this administration. But there is something new, which is very new: now energy and especially the electrons, electricity abundance has become your license, your passport to be on the map of AI and therefore to belong to the next generation of innovation. That is a major revolution, and it's not only here that people realize this. When you look at the part of energy that we were consuming as electricity over the past 30, 40 years, it's been sort of flattish, always at 20%. 20% of what we consume is electricity, the rest is all sorts of other energies. But every country today would tell you that in the next coming 20 years, that 20% will become 40%. So it's a major inflection that we've not seen in our generation. And this is why today there was Doulton repeated: AI supremacy is in fact an electrical play, and this is why we all have a role to play. Well, given all of that, what is our biggest challenge to achieving this electron energy abundance? Or as Dr. Sultan said, how do we take the gridlock out of the grid? The challenge I see today for all of us is time to power. We are deploying GPUs and AI in all applications and it's just the beginning, but consider that only the production of Nvidia, which is a leading actor but not the only actor, represents every year several gigawatts of supplementary power to find and to deploy. And this morning people were speaking about going big, going fast, but then we speak about the way to do that, so it's about nuclear. You don't get a nuclear plant before 8 years. Maybe in 3 years, but that's only some megawatts and not the gigawatts that we need. Today you need 10 years with permitting construction on everything. Gas turbines are highly booked for the next 4 years, so if you want to produce more, you're going to have to wait for more time. So we have to shorten that time to power. And this is where I think we have to integrate the other part of the energy equation, which is the demand. You have plenty of gigawatts available in what's installed today, but most of the energy system is quite inefficient. So if we go into every building today, which is 30 to 40% of the energy consumption, and then you go into manufacturing and deploy digitization of energy systems, you can save—and we do it every day at Schneider—10 to 30% of energy, right? If you go into the grids, and grids are... This morning Dr. Sultan was saying you can deploy the tech of tomorrow with the grid of yesterday. That's so true. That's so true everywhere. It's quite true here. One of the ways to retrofit, renew the grid force is to digitize and to do smart grid. And if we do all of this, then we can free some capacity. What we're going to see also much more, that we are deploying more than anywhere else, are microgrids. So the capacity to produce energy at the bottom of your application or close to your application, then you don't need a transmission line. And then as an industrialist, as a data center operator, as a campus operator, you can be in control of your energy production. You can make sure that not only it's efficient, it's inexpensive, but also it's resilient. So those are the things that we are working on. But if there is one concern I have today, it is a discrepancy between the ambition and the urgency to deploy more energy or find more energy efficiency.
Look, we speak about many applications, but one first thing we should do is apply AI for more efficiency in everything we do. When we do smart buildings – and we have plenty of them in the US – so when we apply AI into smart manufacturing or into grids, you can easily target 10, 20% of energy efficiency. The second thing that you can get is flexibility, which is you can push your consumption or modulate or optimize your consumption at the times where energy can be cheap or more performing. I mean, according to the... So you can really fine-tune your application because everything is connected from the power plant to the plug. So what we are doing today in all of those applications is making sure that we optimize the grid. You have to realize that in most cases a grid is used at less than 50% of its capacity, more than 50% of the time. So if you use storage, if you use a number of things, then you can re-optimize the use of the grid and free a lot of gigawatts.
