Digitisation: Inventive force in the switchgear industry

Digitisation helps in improving performance and reliability of switchgears, but to what extent? The experts discuss it out!

Digitisation will have a great impact on electrical distribution as it will improve operations and increase flexibility through the chain. Installing digital switch-gear contributes greatly to increasing operational efficiency of a city.

Sameer Saxena, Director-Marketing, Legrand (Group) India says, “It also helps in self-monitoring and diagnostic of the switchgear by way of which the reliability can be enhanced. Today, switchgears maintain a history of various fault conditions and triggers to alarms for parameters critical to high system and switchgear reliability.”

This not only provides avenue to optimise the system but also helps to take actions which enhance the uptime and reliability of the switchgear installed.

Digitisation in switchgear has helped in many ways. Monitoring of switchgear operations, healthiness of distribution networks, power and energy consumption data, etc., have become very easy. These days control and management of power distribution is done through digitized control over switchgear. These devices can communicate with PLCs over a communication network, in some cases; these products can be monitored and controlled through the Internet also.

Gopal Jha, Manager Marketing, Low Voltage Switchgear – Factory Automation & Industrial Division, Mitsubishi Electric India Pvt Ltd says, “It has brought a lot of ease to the installation and maintenance. By having features like fault records, quick identification of a specific cause or trouble has minimised industrial break down time drastically, thereby improving the performance and efficiency.”

Piyush Garg, Addl. Director, Balaji Switchgears Pvt Ltd, says, “Digitisation has a key input of communication which helps us interact with our systems, and in today’s time we need to have system’s which are interactive and can provide us real time data and analytics. This data in turn helps us to decide that how well we can use our energy effectively and efficiently. Also life of entire system gets increased as the usage if diversified and optimised with the help us digitisation. This helps in improving the performance of system on the whole and to get better results for the eco-structure.”

Preparedness in the area
According to Saxena of Legrand (Group) India, Legrand has been actively innovating on digital solutions and connected devices. He explains, “We offer EMS (Energy Management Solution) which enables to remotely access various electrical parameters about the installation and can plot trends like energy consumption. With many of our products, you can upgrade an existing installation with the help of an additional module and communicate remotely to get information pertaining to the device and the installation. This is used by the maintenance team of commercial buildings and industries where one needs to monitor switchgear and installation.”

Sameer say, “Legrand aims to digitalise 40 out of the 100 product families that we have by 2020. Currently, we have more than 30 product families having digital capabilities. We see this as a huge potential and are fully prepared for it.”

Piyush explains, “We as a system integrator for industrial automation and switchgears, are prepared for this challenge of GOI. With our super strong technical partners we have a complete, comprehensive and smart range of digital switchgears which are compatible with industry 4.0, and have a user friendly interface. Also with our dedicated service teams we are keen to help all in the installation and after sales support.”

Jha, acknowledges, “We, at Mitsubishi Electric, are pioneers in delivering smart and intelligent power distribution and energy monitoring solutions to our customers. Our entire range of switchgear products such as ACBs, MCCBs, metering productshas inbuilt communication ports, which enable them to integrate with upstream plan control and monitoring system through various industrial network communication protocols.”

He concludes, “We offer high-end energy monitoring systems that can be configured over a local PC as well as through a Web-based screen to monitor plant and machine performance and energy consumption status. We are continuously developing next-gen smart switchgears, which will complement the future trends and meet customers’ expectations in this sector.”

We are continuously developing next-gen smart switchgears, which will complement the future trends and meet customers’ expectations in this sector
Gopal Jha, Manager Marketing, Low Voltage Switchgear – Factory Automation & Industrial Division, Mitsubishi Electric India Pvt Ltd

We have more than 30 product families having digital capabilities. We see this as a huge potential and are fully prepared for it
Sameer Saxena, Director-Marketing, Legrand (Group) India

We as a system integrator for industrial automation and switchgears, are prepared for this challenge of GOI.
Piyush Garg, Addl. Director, Balaji Switchgears Pvt Ltd