Strategy and Workplan for Rollout of Smart Meters in Prepaid Mode

Abstract

The power utilities across India are looking at smart metering with AMI towards accurate energy meter reading collection without manual intervention, improving revenue performance, remote connection and disconnection of power, facilitating real time analysis of power consumption/power quality parameters by the consumers and use of analytics on the huge volume of data generated by the smart grid system for building an effective decision support system. However, use of smart meters in postpaid only mode may not overcome many of the issues associated with the conventional metering system. Postpaid smart metering cannot ensure 100% collection efficiency as the remote disconnection procedure is partially dependent upon human intervention and procedural bottlenecks. Also, although postpaid implementation of smart metering collects energy meter readings automatically, the implementation still requires preparation of revenue bills in the utility’s revenue billing system as well as printing and dispatching the same to consumers’ premises. This involves considerable operational cost as well as time. The objective of this technical paper is to formulate robust and workable strategy plus workplan for rolling out smart metering in prepaid mode. The strategy takes care of migration of non-smart to smart prepaid mode, migration of smart prepaid to smart postpaid mode, migration of standalone prepaid mode to smart prepaid mode, integration of utility’s billing engine with the MDMS system of the smart metering system, appropriate frequency of invoicing of consumers, automatic connection/disconnection of consumers based on their account balance and facilitating real time tracking of account balance by the consumers. The workplan suggests ways to minimize resistance from consumers, if any, during rollout of smart metering in prepaid mode.