With projects in hand from two major power utilities in India — Tata Power and Essel, Cyan , a wireless solutions provider for utilities is now hopeful of being a part of the smart grid ecosystem in the country.
Recently, Tata Power Mumbai has selected a consortium led by Larson & Turbo to deploy Cyan’s CyLec Advanced Metering Infrastructure. Cyan’s 865 MHz radio communication modules will be installed inside the L&T smart meters that will be deployed for Tata. The initial contract with Tata is for the deployment of 5,000 consumer meters in a district in Mumbai and is currently planned to go live in early 2015.
The consortium includes Cyan and Neosilica, who in partnership will provide an integrated CyLec AMI solution to Tata. L&T will supply smart meters, with CyLec wireless technology inside, and Neosilica will provide a Meter Data Acquisition System “MDAS” interface from Cyan’s Head End Server into Tata’s Meter Data Management System for billing and fault management.
Similarly, Essel has been awarded an initial order for 5000 meters to another consortium lead by Aquameas Instrument to deploy Cyan’s retrofit solution.
Shiv Kaushik, Country Manager – India, Cyan, said that the two orders are initial signs of Cyan making inroads into the country’s smart metering landscape.
According to India Smart Grid Forum (ISGF), India has an estimated 200 million static electricity meters that are likely to be replaced or upgraded as smart meters in the next 5-10 years. At an estimated $10 cost per meter for upgrade to smart meter, the total market opportunity for smart metering communications and wireless infrastructure solutions alone exceeds $2 billion over the next ten years.
He said the company has been closely working with HCL Technologies and that they have an understanding the system integrators like Wipro and Tata Consultancy Services that will be the key stakeholders in the Restructured Accelerated Power Development and Reforms Programme (R-APDRP) projects in the country.
Cyan started off about four years back as a maker of micro controllers, Kaushik said that today they make chips for every application, and they have solutions not just for power utilities, but gas distributors as well. The company has already been running pilots with state power utilities in Gujarat, Haryana and Tamil Nadu.
Kaushik said, “the biggest challenge for us was to price the solution such that the cost of the smart meter does not go to high. Typically, a static meter costs anywhere between $10- $12 another $10-$12 would be spent to transform a dumb meter to a smart one.”
Talking about the company’s plans to further expand in the market, Kaushik said, “We expect to make further substantial investments in India over the next several years, in addition to the millions of dollars we’ve already invested. Cyan has already established manufacturing facilities for our smart metering solutions in India. We also plan to hire more local sales and customer support staff.”