The Smart Electricity Meter in the Dock: Much

By Er Jagmohan Sharma

Jammu these days is witnessing an uncalled-for, but “vocal halla-gulla” against installation of smart electricity meters. Most of the people involved in “halla-gulla”, unfortunately, have not understood the meters & the intention behind installing them. They have not even understood the “accuracy class” of the meters, thereby blaming them for “running fast”. Unfortunately, again, there has not been an informed discussion about meters within society or with electricity utilities, subject matter specialists or the industry involved in designing & manufacturing the meters. Most of the time a minor problem here & a minor problem there is blown out of proportion, many times over, to generate an impression as if the smart meters have “unleashed a tsunami” that will economically bankrupt the electricity consumers.

To put it simply, it is far from the truth.;

The smart meters measure the electricity consumed by a consumer & accordingly, the power utility raises a bill to be paid by the concerned person or institution to the electricity utility – JPDCL or KPDCL, as the case may be. The revenue goes to the J&K government & not to the utilities. We must remember that electricity is a commodity like any other consumable (with no shelf life) & has a price tag associated with it. Meters are important so that every unit of electricity is accounted for. The government of course has the freedom to implement ways & means to ensure that the poorer sections of the society are taken care of & are not unnecessarily burdened.

The tariff approved by the Joint Regulatory Commission of J&K in 2022 has a built-in mechanism to take care of the poorer strata of society. A cursory look at the tariff order of the Joint Regulatory Commission will reveal that the tariff is divided into multiple blocks/categories for different categories of consumers viz domestic, commercial, industrial, agriculture & so on. The greater the energy one consumes greater is the bill required to be paid. The tariff in J&K continues to be the lowest in the country, but the losses are the highest.

The smart meters being deployed in J&K have been in service since 2011 across the world. These meters have a proven technology & we have an improved version of them. The latest batch of the meters that are being deployed are of Schneider make & they have been procured through an open tendering process. There are very stringent technical specifications specified for the meters as well as the associated communication network that enables secure transmission of consumer data to the data centre of JPDCL/KPDCL.

That is not all. The meters have gone through a very stringent process manufacturing & every component of the meter is tested for its fidelity as per well-defined manufacturing & assembly process norms. This is not true of the smart meter alone, but true of all such gadgets used in the electricity industry or elsewhere. After all every car manufactured by the car companies are also subject to tests in the factories before they are put out for sale. The same is true of washing machines as well as most complicated aircraft.

Coming back to the smart meters, it must be mentioned that the meters, once assembled, are tested jointly by the engineers of manufacturers & the customer as per a jointly approved protocol & then dispatched for deployment only after the customer is fully satisfied with the working of the equipment.

The meters that are being deployed in J&K or elsewhere in the country & the world are essentially accuracy class-1 meters. This means that the possibility of an error in these meters is very minuscule. Every meter dispatched from the works of the manufacturer to the destination of deployment has a test certificate attached to it mentioning the tests carried out on the meter & the consequent test results.

Thus, the meters that are being deployed in Jammu or in Kashmir have undergone these stringent testing processes & frankly speaking, need not be tested for any of the parameters locally. If at all tests are required to be carried out on any of the meters they should be carried out in the renowned test facilities that we have in several locations in the country on a sample basis.

Now, the question that arises is why some of consumers feel that they have been duped or will be duped because of the smart meters.

The problem is not with the smart meters. It's actually the old electronic meters that are being replaced with smart meters. The protocol in place is that when the old meters are to be replaced with smart meters their (old meter) readings should be photographed & submitted to JPDCL/KPDCL for record. Thus the readings on the old meters, before they are replaced, are now the “true” readings with photographic evidence.

It is understood that in several cases these readings do not match with the manually communicated readings available on the records of the power utilities & in fact are much higher. For example, if the photographed reading of the meter of a particular consumer is 35000 the manually communicated reading available on the records of the power utility could be 20000. This means that the consumer has a liability of 15000 units towards the power utilities. This is just an example.

Therefore, the power utilities are now requesting the consumers to pay the tariff for the balance of power consumed as per the readings of the old conventional meter. At this stage the smart meter doesn't even come into the picture, it's just not there & hence there is no question of a high or low “smart meter reading.”

Now the question that arises is why is there a difference in readings of the old meters. I'll just leave it there & it could be anybody's guess?!

In Jammu, a perception is being created by some that the problem is with the smart meters while the problem is actually with the “readings” of the conventional electronic meters that were recorded against the account of several consumers manually. It's this manual interface that has created this unsavoury situation.

The smart meters tend to reduce the manual intervention to a bare minimum after they are installed & commissioned. Today J&K has around 11 lakh electricity consumers in Jammu & almost an equal number in Kashmir. It has been impossible to generate bills for all these consumers & as per records, the billing efficiency of Jammu was around 68% while for Kashmir the corresponding figure was 47% (financial year 2022/23). This in effect means that the power utilities were able to raise bills only for 7,48,000 consumers in Jammu while as in Kashmir this number was 5,17,000 consumers. Corresponding collection efficiency was 83% (6,20,840 consumers) in Jammu while it was 98% (5,06,660 consumers) in Kashmir. Given this state of affairs, no wonder that the AT&C losses in J&K are higher than 60%.

It is not humanly possible to collect the billing data of 22 lakh electricity consumers of J&K during the last week of the month enabling the generation of bills in the first week of the next month so that the consumers are able to make payments in the balance period of the month.

It's because of this that automation has become a necessity. The smart meters, associated communication networks & data centres are major steps in this direction – in the direction of automation.

Thus smart meters are a boon for J&K like any other part of the country. These meters & the associated system will bring in much-needed transparency in the working of the power utilities & also ensure that honest electricity consumers don't face difficulties or harassment.

The good news is that J&K already has closer to 3,72,000 installed meters. These meters are being installed by all other electricity utilities in the country also. UP leads by around 12 lakh meters installed.

Thus, it becomes incumbent on the part of electricity utilities to provide 24×7 quality power to the consumers living in areas where smart metering has been completed as per the publicly announced directions of Sh. Manoj Sinha, the Hon'ble Lieutenant Governor of the UT of J&K. The power utilities should immediately develop a protocol, easily understandable by the consumers, for achieving the target set by the Hon'ble LG & make it public for the general understanding of the consumers.

(The writer is a former Executive Director of Power Grid Corporation Ltd & former Chairman of JPDCL) (The views expressed are of Author's own)