August 14, 2008 -- ABB is designing a complete power supply solution for what will be the world’s largest international financial center and one of India’s biggest ever infrastructure projects - Gujarat International Finance Tec-City.

Occupying a greenfield site of more than 500 acres in the rapidly developing state of Gujarat, Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT) will be the world’s largest international financial services center and IT hub when it is completed in 2017.

The site consists of about 100 million square feet of commercial and residential floor space, including an 80-story signature building known as Diamond Tower. The center will dwarf comparable financial districts like London’s Docklands, Shanghai’s Pudong and Tokyo’s Shinjuku.

GIFT is located midway between Gujarat’s two most important cities, Ahmedabad (India’s seventh largest city) and Gandhinagar, and will be linked to both by expressways and mass transit railway systems. The massive development is expected to provide employment for around 500,000 people, and homes for about 50,000.

In addition to advanced ICT (information and communications technologies) systems, GIFT will function as an environmentally friendly eco-city, incorporating renewable energy sources like solar power, energy-efficient intelligent buildings and district cooling.

ABB was selected by Fairwood India, the project management consultants for GIFT, to design a complete power distribution system for the entire city to international benchmark levels of grid reliability, power quality and energy efficiency.

How to power a state-of-the-art city
ABB's power distribution solution will reduce power losses and energy consumption to levels even better than internationally accepted standards.

The solution is based on a peak-demand capacity of 1,000 megawatts, and includes power technologies like extra high-voltage underground cables, underground gas-insulated substations, dry-type distribution transformers in high-rise buildings, and energy management systems which control and manage the entire power supply system.

The solution is benchmarked against other international installations like Burj Dubai (the tallest building in the world for which ABB supplied the power equipment); the ABB-designed Barbana underground substation in Spain which incorporates a waterfall to eradicate transformer noise, dissipate heat and enhance its urban location; and the Hong Kong Electric Company, which has achieved a reliability rating of 99.998 percent every year since 1998.

Construction of Tec-City is scheduled to begin at the end of 2008. Memorandums of understanding have already been signed with a number of Indian and international companies for more than 40 million square feet of space. The total cost of the entire project is estimated at $16.3 billion.

ABB is a leader in power and automation technologies that enable utility and industry customers to improve performance while lowering environmental impact. The ABB Group of companies operates in around 100 countries and employs more than 115,000 people.