L&T partners with UK-based Cyan for Advanced Metering Solutions

Larsen and Toubro (L&T) has entered into a partnership with a UK-based Cyan Holdings for its Metering and Protection Systems business. Metering and protection Systems of L&T is a part of its Electrical & Home Automation services. Cyan Holdings is an integrated systems design company delivering mesh based flexible solutions lighting control, utility metering and industrial metering.

L&T presently is one of the leading producer of electronic/electrical meters in India with a vast portfolio of metering products that includes electronic tri vector meters, single-and three-phase energy meters, availability based tariff (ABT) meters, intelligent panel meters, demand controllers, card-based prepaid meters and GSM modems, all of which are designed and developed by in-house R&D. They are also involved in the design and manufacture of automatic meter reading solutions that involve meter networking, collecting meter data and transporting such data to a central station for display, analysis and report generation.

Cyan Holdings recently participated in Smart Energy India Conference in India where it demonstrated a live communication link to a pilot installation of networked smart meters located in an industrial cluster in NOIDA, a suburb of Delhi. Its CyLec wireless communication solution for electricity meters comprising RF modules, gateways configured as Data Concentrator Units (DCUs) and communication software was able to perform at the most robust of conditions. Mr Mohandes during the conference also added "Our CyLec pilot further confirms that smart metering in India requires good range and penetration. For this, wireless communications at 865/867MHz frequency is best suited allowing multiple overlapping meter networks operating over a 500m stretch of several city blocks. We use banking level security throughout our system, and it is scalable to multiple millions of meters in field deployed on multiple redundant servers".

According to the press release, both L&T and Cyan Holdings have identified a number of projects in India where there is a need for 865MHz based interoperable Wireless AMI with a requirement for end to end communications enabling remote tamper detection and reporting. The parties have entered into this strategic alliance as they believe that this technology is likely to become a major factor in the fast growing Indian electricity metering market.

L&T has been taking great steps towards enhancing it product portfolio for metering and automation services-an integral part of the smart grid. The latest activities have been its partnerships with Cyan Holdings, Telvent (now Schneider Electric) apart from the acquisitions in switch gear. It is expected to be one of the rapidly growing companies in India in Smart Grid in the coming years.

Courtesy: Pratik Sonthalia, IIT-Roorkee