Jagmohan Sharma
It was wonderfully pleasing to hear the President of the Jammu High Court Bar Association during his recent press conference, wherein some substantive points related to smart meters were raised by him.
It’s probably the first time in Jammu that any collective or an individual has tried to open up a conversation in the real Indian tradition of dialogue and discussion on the important issue of smart meters that is bound to touch the lives of all of us as electricity consumers.
At the outset and without any hesitation I would like to mention that the smart electricity meters will touch the lives of the consumers of electricity in the UT of J&K in a very positive manner. This is because the smart meters and the software application associated with it will bring in transparency for the consumers and they shall be able to keep a track of the electricity consumed by them and payments made thereof through their smart mobile phones.
The application keeps the consumer informed about the energy consumed on a particular day on hourly basis. It compares the electricity consumed by a consumer with respect to the previous day as also with the previous month and provides a consumer the meter readings on daily basis. It’s a misconception that the consumers have to “climb up a pole” to read the meter. It also provides the consumers information about the cost of electricity consumed in Rupee terms. All the information is available on the mobile of the consumer. The consumer can access his/her data irrespective of his/ her location as the application is web-based.
In short, a smart meter and the web-application associated with it empowers the consumers to understand the various facets of electricity consumed by them and the cost involved.
It may once again be mentioned that the Govt of J&K has taken loans to the tune of Rs.31 crores during last few years to purchase power from the electricity generators for its consumers. During the financial year 2022/23 the J&K Govt purchased electricity for Rs.8689 crores while as it was able to collect a revenue of Rs.3608 crores from its 22 lakh electricity consumers. The cost of Rs.8689 crores is the raw cost of electricity and does not include the cost of employees, operation and maintenance cost, the establishment cost etc. of the power utilities. If these costs are added too, the cost of electricity purchased would easily touch Rs.10,000 crores. Thus, more the electricity you consume, the more is the loss to the distribution utilised .
It’s anybody’s guess as to how long this situation can continue. If we want quality 24×7 electricity in J&K, not only for ourselves but also for our generation next, the electricity consumed needs to be paid. At the same time the transmission and distribution utilities should maintain an audited account of every unit of electricity pushed into distribution system by transmission and further distributed by the distribution utility.
The Govt will of course have to make adequate provisions for the weaker sections of the society and the electricity act 2003 is very clear about such social obligations. It’s to mentioned that the electricity tariff approved in 2022, by the Joint Electricity Regulatory Commission, J&K is the lowest in the country. It also has a built-in provision for the Below Poverty Line households.
Coming back to the smart meters and the questions raised by the Jammu High Court Bar Association regarding the meters installed earlier by the distribution utilities.
The earlier meters that were installed in J&K in 2004/05 were of Genus make with electromechanical counters. These meters covered only 10% of the consumers. Thereafter, electronic meters with LCD display and optical port were installed around 2011/12 with coverage of around 50% consumers. Useful life of an electronic energy meter is around 10 years, as is the case with most of the electronic equipment viz servers, computers, mobiles, laptops and the like. The cost of the meters was not loaded on the consumers in J&K. It is a different matter that some of the consumers might have opted for purchasing the meters themselves (may be because power utilities didn’t have meters at a particular time). In such cases the consumers are not required to handover the meters to distribution utilities at the time of installation of the smart meters. They will, of course, have to allow the representatives of the utilities to take a photograph of the meter being retained by them.
The smart meters are an advancement on the electronic meters in the sense that they not only measure electricity at the consumers end precisely but also have the facility to communicate the data of energy consumed to the data centre through secure communication medium in real time basis. The data is transmitted every half an hour. There in kicks in not only accuracy, but the human interface is also said goodbye to.
The added advantage is that the bills can be prepared, without any human intervention, at the end of the month and communicated to the post-paid consumers through e-mail or as a hard copy based upon the choice of the consumer.
Similarly, the consumers who choose the prepaid mode of payments are the most advantageously placed ones as information about their power consumption and billing is available to them on their mobile phones.
Coming to the error part of the bills. As discussed in one of my earlier articles too, the difference is because of the reading on the meters that were “retired” consequent to the installation of the smart meters. The readings from the “retired meters” were “humanly” taken and recorded into power utility ledgers thereby resulting in errors on several occasions. The cumulative error (over months or years) is basically responsible for the higher billing in several cases. Thus, though the smart meter is being made the scapegoat, it is basically the “human element involved in reading and recording the data” that is responsible for such an error. The old adage can be modified slightly to say “human element ne (electronic meter se) khatta ki, smart meter ne saza paayi.” The problem is with the readings of the retiring electronic meter and not with smart meter as at that point the smart meter was nowhere in the picture.
The President of the Jammu HC Bar Association raised a very pertinent point as to if this is going to be the final word on metering. I am afraid not. With the influx and development of artificial intelligence in every sphere of technology and life no one is sure about what the future holds in technology and thus metering can’t be an exception. But, today the smart meters are one part of the solution to bring down AT&C losses.
It is also worth mentioning that the power utilities in J&K have already installed closer to 3,80,000 smart meters and they are generally functioning well. Some teething problems cannot be ruled out while panning the programme out, but those are minuscule compared to the meters installed.
At the same time the power utilities must ensure that their basic/core electrical engineering network is smart too, which I am afraid it is not.
This is possible only when the engineers, the HR and the finance departments are on the same page and every one owns up the organisation like a mother owns her child. The corporations created after unbundling of the power sector are still working in the departmental mode. It’s yet to dawn on the concerned that distribution, transmission, generation, power purchase, load dispatch are specialised activities. Transfer of staff from one vertical to another is antithesis of specialisation. At the same time there has to be optimal manpower for the huge infrastructure that has come up over the last few years under centrally sponsored schemes. The current manpower is completely insufficient to cater to the voluminous infra now in place. Added to that is the shortage of skilled manpower in the power utilities.
The new areas like SCADA, smart metering, data centres and communications require people with different skill sets. Same is true of people required for electrical asset management/maintenance, preventive and predictive maintenance, routine and emergency maintenance. With web/ internet connectivity of several services of the power utilities, it’s imperative that they have skilled manpower to handle cyber security issues.
Briefly speaking, there is a long way to go for power utilities in the direction of consumer satisfaction that is providing quality, 24×7 power to the consumers.
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