Power Losses: Plugging It Right

With smart meters taking off, consumers will benefit from accurate readings and no longer face billing shocks, while revenues will go up, writes V Rishi Kumar

- V Rishi Kumar

Try and assimilate this. Last year India sold about 1,200 billion kWh of electricity with a billing efficiency of 83 percent. This means about 200 billion units of electricity were not billed.

If you presume a conservative average cost of supply at 5 a unit, that is 1 lakh crore of revenue was never billed. In other words, it was revenue lost. Now, can a sector survive with such losses and so much of leakage, asks Saurabh Kumar, Managing Director of Energy Efficiency Services Limited (EESL). All these stressed power assets are also largely because we are unable to bill this one lakh crore and the only answer to this problem is setting up smart meters, he adds.

Taking this head-on, EESL started the Smart Meter National Programme (SMNP) in four districts of Uttar Pradesh, some parts of Delhi and three districts in Haryana and replaced nearly five lakh traditional meters with smart meters which were integrated with the IT back-end and billing software.

EESL, which began as an Energy Service Company (ESCO) promoted by state-owned companies NTPC, PFC, REC and Powergrid to service the Central government Ujala scheme, is implementing the project to retrofit over 250 million conventional meters with smart variants. As of now the investment committed for 10 million meters is 4500 crore and for covering around 300 million meters it would go up to 1,50,000 crore. The project is expected to lead to an 80-100 percent improvement in billing efficiency.

Consumer empowerment