Point-Blank: By 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 & 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 & the software application associated with it will bring 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 an hourly basis. It compares the electricity consumed by a consumer with respect to the previous day as well with the previous month and provides a consumer the meter readings on a daily basis. It's a misconception that consumers have to “climb up a pole” to read the meter. It also provides the consumers with 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 empower 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 the 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 it was able to collect the 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. If these costs are added too, the cost of electricity purchased would easily touch Rs.10,000 crores. Thus, the more electricity you consume, the more is the loss to the Govt exchequer.
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 next generation, 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 the 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 society and the Electricity Act 2003 is very clear about such social obligations. It's to mention again, at the cost of repetition, 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 & 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 made with electromechanical counters. These meters covered only 10% of the consumers. Thereafter, electronic meters with LCD displays and optical ports were installed around 2011/12 with coverage of around 50% of consumers. The useful life of an electronic energy meter is around 10 years, as is the case with most electronic equipment viz servers, computers, mobiles, laptops & 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 (maybe because power utilities didn't have meters at a particular time). In such cases, the consumers are not required to hand over 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 bear advancement on the electronic meters in the sense that they not only measure electricity at the consumer's end precisely but also have the facility to communicate the data of energy consumed to the data centre through a secure communication medium on a real real-time basis. The data is transmitted every half an hour. The features not only vouch for accuracy, but the human interface is also said goodbye to.
he added advantage is that the bills can be prepared, without any human intervention, at the end of the month & 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 & 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 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 & recording the data ” that is responsible for such an error. The old adage can be modified slightly to say “human element ne khatta ki, smart meter ne saza paayi.” The problem is with the readings of the retiring electronic meter & not with the 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 & development of artificial intelligence in every sphere of technology & life no one is sure about what the future holds in technology & thus metering can't be an exception. But, today the smart meters are only “one element” of the solution to bring down AT&C losses.
At the same time, the power utilities still have to 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 & the finance departments are on the same page & everyone owns up the organisation like a mother owns her child. The corporations created after the unbundling of the power sector are still working in the departmental mode. It's yet to dawn on the concern that distribution, transmission, generation, power purchase, and load dispatch are specialised activities. Transfer of staff from one vertical to another is the 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. Added to that is the shortage of skilled manpower in the power utilities.
The new areas like SCADA, smart metering, data centres & communications require people with different skill sets. The same is true of people required for electrical asset management/maintenance, preventive & predictive maintenance, and routine & 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 – quality, 24×7 power !!
