Europe’s ambitions to lead the clean-energy transition hinge not only on policy and investment but also on the electronics quietly powering the continent’s emerging Power-to-X technologies, according to industrial leaders gathered at Schneider Electric’s Innovation Summit in Copenhagen this week.
Power-to-X (PtX) — the process of converting renewable electricity into hydrogen, ammonia, or synthetic fuels — is being touted as a cornerstone of Europe’s industrial decarbonisation strategy. But executives say progress will depend on the continent’s ability to deploy advanced automation, industrial IoT, and AI-enabled control systems at scale.
Yesterday Schneider announced that it had provided the key technology behind European Energy’s Kassø Power-to-X (PtX) plant, a major milestone in producing e-methanol as a commercially viable clean fuel. Topsoe is a key technical partner for The facility, which is located in Kassø, a small coastal area in southern Denmark on the Jutland peninsula, near the town of Middelfart.
Paul George Moses, Chief Technology Officer for Power-to-X at Danish chemical engineering group Topsoe, said the sector’s future rests on “delivering solutions that end up with our customers” and coupling operational data with design through automation. “When you deploy these machines, you need to optimise not only how you build them but how you learn from them. That requires integrated digital systems and a high degree of automation all the way to the shop floor,” he said.
At the heart of this shift is a new class of electronics — from sensors and variable-speed drives to open software platforms — designed to make Europe’s manufacturing base more flexible. Gwenaelle Avice Huet, EVP of Industrial Automation at Schneider Electric, described a “game-changing” approach she called software-defined automation.
The concept, she said, “decouples the intelligence from the hardware,” allowing manufacturers to optimise plants using software rather than replacing physical controllers.
“In the past, you needed a different player for every device,” she said. “Now you can plug software across an entire factory. It’s like moving from CDs to streaming — the intelligence is in the cloud, not the player.”
For companies like Topsoe, whose Power-to-X systems convert power, air, and water into fuels and chemicals, digital electronics underpin everything from predictive maintenance to process control. “In our labs and factories, IoT and robotics have given us the biggest acceleration,” said Moses. “We come from materials science, which isn’t very automated. But now we’re bringing automation into both the lab and the plant.”
That includes the use of large language models. Moses said Topsoe developed its own internal version of ChatGPT to “democratise digital skills” across the workforce. “It’s set a base skill level across the company,” he said, adding that engineers now use AI to generate and translate standard operating procedures, cutting weeks from product-development cycles.
Still, executives cautioned that Europe’s perfectionism risks slowing innovation. “Technology is moving so fast now that everything cannot be perfect before it’s released,” said Lars Sandahl Sørensen, Chief Executive of Dansk Industri, the Danish industry association. “We need to accept continuous improvement and scale these technologies faster.”
As Europe’s policymakers prepare new industrial and energy frameworks, Moses said success would ultimately depend on making Power-to-X electronics scalable and affordable. “We need to see the first plants at scale, operating successfully,” he said. “Once that happens, the learning will drive down costs — and automation will make sure we can build the next generation faster.”
