Cloud services and grid modernisation to play key role in smart electricity

IoT and smart devices market will reach nearly $15 billion; and a large chunk of it will be in India and the emerging economies.
Jitendra Agrawal, MD, The Motwane Manufacturing Co. Pvt Ltd

Discussing the benefits from smart electricity, Jitendra Agrawal, MD, The Motwane Manufacturing Co. Pvt Ltd highlight how cloud-based platforms like MOTWARE can provide growth opportunities for utility-based IoT market.

What is going to be your focus in this edition of ELECRAMA?
ELECRAMA has always been the biggest platform to bring together thought leaders across the world, and introduce them to technology and innovation in India. Motwane Manufacturing has always been at the forefront in developing products and services which keep pushing the boundaries of excellence and engineering, through indigenous research and development capabilities. Our purpose in exhibiting at ELECRAMA 2020 is, to showcase Motwane’s next generation of connected test and measurement portfolio which is a seamless integration of hardware, software and analytics.

How do you view the rise of IoT and Industry 4.0 transforming the sector?
IoT has been powering the transition from Industry 3.0 to Industry 4.0, and will further transform the power sector by streamlining operations, asset health monitoring, and bringing down power bills of the industrial consumers. The power sector is already witnessing benefits from early industrial and consumer IoT applications like smart meters and smart thermostats.

Many power utilities and industries are embracing IoT to benefit from these technological advancements, combined with robotics, AI, machine learning and predictive maintenance. This has been majorly observed in demand side management due to heavy participation from power distributors. Similar technology will surface and transform the generation and transmission segments.

What kind of opportunities in smart electricity for India?
Smart electricity will have benefits in all the 3 segments of generation, transmission and distribution, as well as consumption.

In the next 4-5 years, the global utility, IoT and smart devices market will reach nearly $15 billion; and a large chunk of it will be in India and the emerging economies. Once all the systems are connected through IoT, the system can perform effective load balancing, load flow analysis, identify faulty transformers, and alert the nearby maintenance team for quick response along with real time alerts, notifications and scheduling.

In addition, increasing adoption of cloud-based platforms like MOTWARE, and government-backed grid modernisation initiatives by Powergrid and other utilities, provides strong growth opportunities in utility-based IoT market.

Can you brief about the latest innovations and additions for your range of solutions?
We are scheduled to launch ‘MOTWARE’ in December 2019, which is one of our latest additions in our solution. It combines 7-decade-long expertise in electrical test and measurement, with our R&D in IoT and SaaS based services, gave us the ability to bring together these diverse elements; and they are going to be extremely relevant for our customers. MOTWARE consists of IoT based transformer monitoring solutions, which are modular in nature and can be customised as per our customer’s needs.

Along with monitoring, it also provides real-time analytics combining the various parameters into meaningful insights, thereby helping us increase the lifespan of the valuable assets. We are also launching our connected testing kits, which send data to the MOTWARE App, thereby converting testing into a complete paperless activity. Lastly, MOTWARE also organises all your test data, including historical data to provide meaningful insights and one-click reporting and dashboarding abilities to our clients. MOTWARE also has hundreds of inbuilt test templates and reports which can enable true digital transformation for our clients.

What are your plans and projections for next two years?
As I mentioned earlier, we will be launching MOTWARE in December 2019 which combines our 7-decade-long expertise. Moreover, 2019 was a great year for Motwane, as we made great progress in getting new products to markets. Our Oil BDV and Oil tan delta resistivity kits are on par with global leaders in terms of quality, aesthetics and specifications. Our connected test and measurement portfolio has also progressed at rapid pace with most of our testing kits getting IoT enabled. Motware, our specialised test data software has also been accepted positively by large EPCs and O&M contractors, due to the tremendous value it brings for them in terms of data integrity, insights and analytics they bring to the table.

We are very optimistic about the growth path for 2020 especially from the export. We have set up an office in Dubai to cater to the Middle East market and look forward to closer interaction and collaboration with customers and partners.