Volume : 9, Issue : 5, May - 2020

Smart Meters : Improving the health of Discoms

Dr A. K. Tiwari

Abstract :

Metering has been the Achilles heel of the Indian electricity distribution sector since many years. Despite recent releases of the national smart meter standard, guidelines on smart metering by the Government of India and other policy level initiatives, Indian distribution companies were not keen to implement smart metering owing to high capital expenditure, leading to fragmented deployment in small numbers. The Indian smart metering journey has seen many ground- eaking initiatives such as release of national standards for smart meters, functional requirements of Advanced Metering requirements of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) by Central Electricity Authority (CEA), announcement by Ministry of Power (MoP) to rollout 250 million smart meters by 2021 etc. While these initiatives provide a strong foundation for implementing smart metering, there are a number of other activities that still need to be taken up in order activities that still need to be taken up in order to unlock full potential. This paper elucidates such initiatives at a financial, regulatory and DISCOM level. Furthermore, key value added services have been mentioned which can be provided to customers by using smart metering. Post implementation of smart metering, significant benefits were observed by the distribution company in areas of increased revenue, reduced operational efforts and acceptance by regulator. This paper also explains case study in Uttar Pradesh, India, that observed these benefits of smart metering.