Sirea is a 28 years old French company base in South of France, near Toulouse. The company is a team of 35 people working on manufacturing PLC dedicated to the field environment, energy or health data monitoring.
For 10 years, Sirea started integrating their own PLC in electric cabinet dedicated to photovoltaic self-consumption for individual houses or industrial power plant.
Interview with David Grand, Head of Marketing at Sirea.
Easy Engineering: What are the main areas of activity of the company?
David Grand: Today a large half of our activity is focused on electric cabinet manufacturing. That kind of product is used to manage energy storage, on-grid connection or off grid self-consumption for farms, hotels, or factories. When storage is not necessary, we only use energy manager like our SmartEMS for energy monitoring. That kind of PLC is already use in the health field like hospital to manage medical flows or in environment to switch ON/OFF devices in isolated sites.
E.E: What’s the news about new products?
D.G: We just built a new offer dedicated to cities and small town that need to manage from one web app all their devices to reduce energy consumption and so decrease carbon footprint.
E.E: What are the ranges of products?
D.G: We have to ranges of products: electric cabinets with 2 sub categories : AEA cabinets for self-consumption with energy storage (on recycled batteries) for individuals with power supply of 3, 5 or 10 kW, and AEH cabinets self-consumption with our energy storage, for more than 10 kW.
The second range of product is that we call the « intelligent hardware » which is the controller that we integrate in our cabinets. This is a range of PLC called MicroARM, that helps controlling devices from web or in other way (MPPT, WiFi, Lorawan, etc), and to retrieve data measurement for monitoring.
E.E: At what stage is the market where you are currently active?
D.G: We left for 2 or 3 years the innovators part of the adoption curve. Now we’re in early adopters (visionaries) part. The product now fit to the market, and we can see it by the rising demand that is accelerating. People do not ask anymore some specific configuration on the product; they need the existing product because it perfectly match with what they were looking for.
E.E: What can you tell us about market trends?
D.G: With Ukraine war, climate crisis and energy cost increasing every day, the next months and years will probably see a rise of people motivation to produce themselves their energy (for example solar energy) and store the surplus of their production. There are many advantages of doing this on unstable electrical grid, or on high electric cost countries.
David Grand, Head of Marketing at Sirea
E.E: What are the most innovative products marketed?
D.G: I think that one of our most innovative products is our energy controller called SmartEMS. Today it have many use case from our customer. Some of them use it to control air conditioner regarding solar energy production, so they never extract energy from grid for this use. Other use SmartEMS to manage electric vehicle charge points and power supply from different source: grid, solar power plant, storage. The last innovation with the SmartEMS was made by Sirea’s research team: they drive solar energy production to electrolyze to produce « green hydrogen » on a period where production was more important that consumption, and we re-use this hydrogen in fuel cell to produce electricity in the night to load our electric vehicle. This was amazing.
E.E: What estimations do you have for 2022?
D.G: 2022 already starts with a lot of demands for electric cabinets with energy storage. The demands from individuals and companies should rise until middle of the summer, and then when the winter will come, if the current European context does not involve to peace and energy price drop, we probably should face to a more intense period of demand.