India's L&T Allies with GE Energy for Power Plant Automation

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India's engineering and construction giant, Larsen & Toubro Limited -- L&T (Mumbai) has entered into a strategic alliance with GE Energy (NYSE:GE) (Atlanta, Georgia) to explore opportunities in the country's booming power generation industry.

GE Energy will furnish L&T with power plant automation products including the OC 4000 series of Distributed Control Systems (DCS), which will complete L&T's electrical and automation suite of products. L&T will leverage its local presence and expertise in engineering and project execution to deliver comprehensive automation solutions to power plants. The alliance will also target clients in the neighboring countries of Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

The OC 4000 DCS allows for absolute plant control from a single point and integrates applications such as stand-alone control, plant-wide distributed control and protection of assets such as boilers and turbines. The system has advanced fault-tolerant and redundancy designs that enable configuration of very reliable and robust control mechanisms to handle very critical applications.

The first technical application of the DCS is at the Huaneng Group's Huaneng Ruijin plant at Ganzhou in Jiangxi, China. The DCS will be used to control two super-critical boilers in a 350 MW super-critical coal-fired power plant. The equipment will be put into operation in June 2008. The order also represents the first working alliance between China Thermal Power Research Institute and GE Energy's Optimization and Control business. The Huaneng Group (Beijing), a state-owned enterprise administered by the Central Government, is China's power producing giant having ownership of, or controlling interest in, 87 power plants yielding a generating capacity of more than 57 GW.

Early last year, GE Energy was selected by the China Shanghai Corporation for Foreign Economic and Technological Corporation to install its OC 4000 DCS at the Song Dong coal-fired power plant in Vietnam for a plant-wide control system. The unit will be used to control the circulating fluid bed boiler, electrical system, two 110 MW steam turbines and accessories, and circulating water.

The partnership between GE Energy and L&T will immediately focus on the deployment of OC 4000 DCS at two upcoming power plants, each with a capacity of 15 MW to 30 MW, one for JSW Steel Limited (Mumbai) and the other for Vasavadatta Cement (Gulbarga, Karnataka), a BK Birla Group company.

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