The HUDA City Centre station on the Delhi Metro’s Yellow line in Gurgaon just got 2 upgrades last week which are worth mentioning here.

Upgrade #1

Due to long queues at the exits during mornings and evenings, on this Friday (Sept 25), the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation added an additional 10 automatic fare collection (AFC) gates to de-congest the exit area. Earlier only 8 exit AFC gates were present, so now there are 18 of them to handle the crowd at this station which witnesses roughly 50,000 passengers per day.

These new exit gates are part of larger strategy to decongest the exit areas. Back in June, the DMRC had announced that they would install 210 such gates several stations on the network. Some of the other stations included in this plan are at:

Yellow line: INA, Hauz Khas & MG Road Violet line: Moolchand, Nehru Place, Kalkaji Mandir, Govindpuri, Jasola & Badarpur

Upgrade #2

On Wednesday (Sept 23), the DMRC commissioned a solar plant with 400 panels at the station’s parking lot. This 100 kWp solar power plant will power two escalators and provide the overall electricity demand for the building.

The project to install the solar plant was started on August 27th and was completed in just 15 days.

According to the plant’s installation company, Su-Kam:

The energy will be sold at a price of Rs 6 per unit which is much less than the amount charged by the utility system. This ground mounted installation at the car shed / bike port, spreading over an area of 1250 sq. meters has used a super structure made of 400 panels. The system will generate 1,40,000 units of electricity i.e. Rs. 8,40,000 annually. As the life of such solar system is about 25 years, the station may make Rs. 2 crore worth of electricity over the course of 25 years.

In total, the DMRC has so far commissioned solar power facilities with a generation capacity of 2.8 MWp. Some of the other locations include: Dwarka Sector 21, Yamuna Bank, Anand Vihar & Pragati Maidan. The largest Solar installations of 1850 kWp are located along the recently opened Badarpur-Escorts Mujesar section of the Violet line in Faridabad (see: Delhi Metro Installs 9 New Solar Plants on Violet Line). By the end of 2017, the DMRC hopes to ramp the capacity up to 20 MWp.

For more updates on the Delhi Metro, check out the Delhi section of The Metro Rail Guy!

– TMRG