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| ABB will power up the world’s biggest financial district  Swiss engineering firm 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-storey 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. ABB's power dstribution 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. 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. write your comments about the article :: © 2008 Construction News :: home page |