On October 15, 2026, Hitachi Energy and Rockwell Automation announced a collaboration built around what the two companies call a grid-to-process architecture — a way to plan the power infrastructure feeding an industrial site and the production systems running on it as a single project, instead of handing them off between separate grid and automation teams. The initial focus is mining and metals electrification, with the companies signaling intent to extend the approach to other energy-intensive sectors over time.
What "Grid-to-Process" Actually Combines
Hitachi Energy – Rockwell Automation Collaboration — Key Facts
- Grid side (Hitachi Energy): grid connection, power quality, energy management, protection and control for industrial sites.
- Process side (Rockwell Automation): process automation and digital operations covering production control and plant software.
- Initial vertical: mining and metals, an industry undergoing heavy electrification as diesel fleets and generation shift toward grid power.
- Stated goal: let customers plan power and production systems together from the start, rather than engineering them on separate tracks that reconcile late.
- Expansion intent: the companies describe mining as the starting point, not the limit, for the architecture.
- Announcement date: October 15, 2026, confirmed via Hitachi Energy's own press release.
The problem this targets is a familiar one on large industrial builds: the team sizing substations, switchgear, and power quality equipment works largely independently of the team designing the control systems, MES integration, and digital operations layer that will run on that power. The two scopes typically converge only at commissioning, when mismatches in capacity, timing, or data architecture surface as expensive change orders. A joint grid-to-process architecture is meant to catch those mismatches at the planning stage instead — treating electrical infrastructure and process control as one coordinated engineering problem with one delivery timeline.
Why Mining First, and Why This Matters Beyond It
Mining and metals make a logical starting point because electrification there is already underway at scale — haul trucks, crushers, and processing lines are moving off diesel and onto grid or hybrid power, which means grid capacity planning and process automation have to be solved jointly whether or not a vendor offers to do it for them. But the underlying pattern — infrastructure and operations engineered and delivered as one project rather than stitched together after the fact — applies to any energy-intensive plant: chemicals, pulp and paper, data centers, and heavy manufacturing all face the same handoff gap between power engineering and plant software.
What It Means for Manufacturing and Integration Teams
A vendor-level grid-to-process partnership covers the electrical and control hardware; it does not, by itself, solve how that combined system talks to the MES, ERP, dashboards, and mobile tools a specific plant already runs. Every site that adopts a unified power-and-process architecture still needs someone to build the integration and reporting layer that sits on top of it — pulling grid and process data into one operational picture rather than two disconnected ones. That is exactly the gap filled by a team that delivers that kind of integration work turnkey, from the data pipelines through to the operator-facing interface, so a joint grid-to-process architecture doesn't turn into yet another system the plant has to stitch together on its own.
Sources: Hitachi Energy press release, October 15, 2026; International Mining, October 15, 2026.