Smart meters and AMI can significantly reduce AT&C losses for DISCOMs

Anil Rawal, MD & CEO, IntelliSmart. In an interview with EPR Magazine.

India plans to install 250 million smart meters by 2022 at a cost of ₹3 lakh crore. Please share your views on this. 

The Government of India’s Smart Meter National Programme (SMNP) aims at replacing 25 crore conventional meters with smart meters in India. The program was designed to reform the power distribution sector. The objective of the large scale deployment of smart prepaid meters is to help DISCOMs improve their financial and operational efficiencies. 

Smart meters, which establish a two-way communication channel between the point of consumption of electricity and the DISCOM legacy system, automatically record electricity consumption and enable DISCOMs to monitor meter tampering attempts as well as unusual consumption behaviours in real time. Moreover, smart meters are designed adhering to international and regional technical standards that make them resistant to meter tampering which helps minimise electricity theft.

How is the adoption of smart energy metering progressing in the country?

The adoption efforts of smart metering in India have started to gain momentum as AMI service providers, along with the DISCOMs and the Government of India have undertaken initiatives to spread awareness about the immediate and long-term consumer benefits of smart meters. On the policy front, the launch of the reforms-based and results-linked Revamped Distribution Sector Scheme (RDSS), and the Standard Bid Document (SBD) developed by the Government of India, are giving a fillip to the large-scale smart meter rollout program by streamlining and expediting the tendering process of the states.  

What is your view on the ongoing universal smart prepaid metering program of India, and its benefits to the power sector and DISCOMs? 

The smart prepaid meter program, conceived nationally, will help DISCOMs improve their financial and operational efficiencies and make them business viable. Currently, DISCOMs do not have the financial wherewithal to undertake reformative measures or projects. That is where the smart meter program, based on the unique business model developed by EESL/IntelliSmart, has emerged as a viable proposition. The TOTEX model under the DBFOOT (Design Build Finance Own Operate and Transfer) arrangement, on the basis of which EESL/ IntelliSmart are driving the program, is enabling the DISCOMs to adopt the smart meter projects at scale without the burden of upfront financial investments. 

Since we are now focusing more on efficient power supply, how will smart meters play its role in it?

Smart meters, with its two-way communication capability, enables the DISCOMs to read the electricity consumption data of end-consumers, interpret their consumption behaviour over a period of time, and accordingly optimise distribution to ensure exact amount of energy is supplied to meet the need. 

In the long run, DISCOMs can run analytics on this big data (of energy usage patterns of households) and connect with the consumers like never before. It can help generate new insights for both consumers as well as utilities, which lead to effective demand-side management and prevention of power outages and pave the way for a better consumer experience.