A collaboration between Schneider Electric, Microsoft, and h2e POWER has deployed India's first fully autonomous solid oxide electrolyzer system, reducing hydrogen production costs by up to 10% through AI-powered real-time optimization and predictive maintenance. The system has operated for more than 6,000 hours, demonstrating that intelligent automation can make green hydrogen production economically viable at scale .

Why Is Green Hydrogen So Hard to Produce Efficiently?

Green hydrogen is central to global decarbonization plans, but producing it cheaply and reliably remains one of the industry's biggest challenges. Solid oxide electrolyzers (SOECs) offer the highest efficiency of any hydrogen production technology available today, but their operating conditions are extremely demanding. These systems must maintain precise thermal balance, manage hydrogen flow, and monitor equipment health continuously, all while consuming massive amounts of electricity. In fact, electricity accounts for more than 70% of the total cost to produce hydrogen through this method .

h2e POWER, an India-based green technology company, had built a technically superior SOEC system but faced a critical problem: limited real-time visibility and the absence of open, scalable automation were pushing operating costs well above design targets. The company needed a way to operate its electrolyzer autonomously without constant human oversight.

How Did AI Transform This Hydrogen System?

Schneider Electric and Microsoft deployed a new AI-powered control solution on h2e POWER's 20-kilowatt SOEC system. The solution continuously monitors and adjusts the electrolyzer in real time, managing thermal balance, hydrogen flow, energy inputs, safety, and equipment health remotely. Rather than relying on fixed programming, the system learns and adapts to changing conditions, optimizing performance automatically .

The results have been striking. Energy efficiency improved significantly, stack wear was reduced, and the levelized cost of hydrogen, the industry's key economic metric, fell by up to 10%. For a typical 10-megawatt plant, this translates to savings of around 500,000 euros per year . The system has now run for more than 6,000 hours in both partial and full-load conditions, making it one of the most durable autonomous electrolyzer demonstrations in India and possibly anywhere globally.

What Makes This Collaboration Different from Traditional Industrial Automation?

The breakthrough goes beyond just adding AI to an existing system. At the heart of this partnership is a fundamental shift in how industrial automation works. Most factories and energy plants today still run on hardware-locked control systems that are expensive to update, slow to adapt, and difficult to extend with artificial intelligence. Schneider Electric is building a different approach: open, software-defined automation that separates software from hardware .

The collaboration combines three key components:

• EcoStruxure Automation Expert: Schneider Electric's open, software-defined automation platform that lets customers run and reuse their automation applications across different equipment, vendors, and generations of infrastructure without vendor lock-in.
• Industrial Copilot: A Microsoft Azure-powered AI assistant that automates engineering tasks slowing modernization, including writing control logic, configuring systems, and navigating documentation. Engineering teams report up to 50% time savings, with production line changes that once took weeks now completed in hours.
• Microsoft Azure Cloud and Edge Infrastructure: The secure cloud and edge backbone that connects everything from individual sensors to enterprise dashboards, enabling local inference and reinforcement learning.

This open architecture means h2e POWER can redeploy intelligence across its entire installed base across multiple locations without the lock-in that has constrained industrial innovation for decades .

Steps to Modernize Industrial Operations with AI-Driven Automation

For industrial companies looking to modernize without scrapping existing investments, the Schneider Electric and Microsoft approach offers a practical pathway:

• Assess Current Systems: Evaluate your existing hardware-locked control systems and identify which processes consume the most energy or require constant manual monitoring, such as electrolyzer operation or thermal management.
• Adopt Software-Defined Automation: Transition to open, software-defined platforms that separate software from hardware, allowing you to run automation applications across different vendors and equipment generations without proprietary constraints.
• Deploy AI-Powered Monitoring: Implement real-time AI monitoring systems that continuously optimize energy consumption, predict maintenance needs, and adjust operations based on changing conditions rather than fixed programming.
• Leverage Cloud and Edge Infrastructure: Use secure cloud and edge computing to connect sensors, machines, and dashboards, enabling both local processing for speed and centralized learning across multiple sites.
• Measure and Scale: Track key metrics like energy efficiency improvements, cost reductions, and system uptime, then redeploy successful automation logic across your entire installed base.

What Do Industry Leaders Say About This Shift?

The success at h2e POWER has caught the attention of executives across the industrial and technology sectors. Siddharth Mayur, Founder and Managing Director of h2e POWER, emphasized the importance of moving beyond proprietary systems:

"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."

Siddharth Mayur, Founder and Managing Director, h2e POWER

Dayan Rodriguez, Corporate Vice President of Manufacturing and Mobility at Microsoft, highlighted the scalability potential of this approach:

"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."

Dayan Rodriguez, Corporate Vice President, Manufacturing and Mobility, Microsoft

Gwenaelle Huet, Executive Vice President of Industrial Automation at Schneider Electric, stressed that this collaboration answers a critical question facing industrial leaders:

"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."

Gwenaelle Huet, Executive Vice President, Industrial Automation, Schneider Electric

Why Does This Matter Beyond Green Hydrogen?

The implications of this breakthrough extend far beyond hydrogen production. The open, software-defined approach demonstrated at h2e POWER addresses a fundamental challenge across all energy-intensive industries: how to modernize legacy systems while improving efficiency and reducing costs. By proving that complex energy systems can operate autonomously with AI optimization, this collaboration provides a template for factories, refineries, chemical plants, and other industrial facilities seeking to cut energy consumption while maintaining or improving output .

As global decarbonization efforts accelerate, the ability to make energy-intensive processes more efficient through intelligent automation becomes increasingly valuable. This partnership shows that the future of industrial sustainability isn't just about switching to renewable energy sources; it's about making the systems that use that energy smarter, more responsive, and more economical to operate.