The New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) has become the first distribution company (discom) in India to implement 100% smart metering solutions.

The council on Wednesday announced the completion of a project to replace 50,000 conventional electricity meters with smart metres in households under its jurisdiction.

Council officials said smart metres will enhance consumer convenience and rationalise electricity consumption.

“The system will allow consumers to know their consumption on a real-time basis and accordingly, control the use of electricity in their homes, leading to reduced power wastage and providing long-term carbon and financial savings. They can find out the quality of power supply, which would help them save their appliance from tripping. We aim to replicate the pilot project in other cities in the next three years,” said RK Singh, Union Minister of State (IC) for Power and New & Renewable Energy, during the inaugural ceremony of smart meter feature on NDMC’s app at Convention Centre.

The mobile application will enable consumers to access various services at the tap of a finger. The smart meter tab has been added to NDMC app’s home screen.

“With the help of the mobile application, they can switch on or off the meters if they are out of station. There will be no need for meter readers to visit each household as GPRS technology will help NDMC to control the system and the reading billing amount from the headquarters,” said NDMC chairman Naresh Kumar.

The project will help the civic agency to regulate electricity consumption by identifying defaulters using more than the sanctioned load.

“We aim to bring down aggregate technical and commercial losses by way of smart metering, which they said would ‘increase billing efficiency’. It is assumed the project will lead to total savings of Rs 12.47 crore to NDMC, annually, due to improvement in billing efficiency,” said a senior NDMC official.

The project has been implemented by Energy Efficiency Services Limited (EESL), an energy service company of the Government of India.

Lieutenant-governor Anil Baijal asked the NDMC chairman to put all details of the project on a portal so that other civic agencies can replicate the model in their areas. “The NDMC can share their experience, success and failures about various projects implemented by them on the portal for the convenience of other three civic agencies in Delhi,” said Baijal.

e-charging stations

To promote the use of e-vehicles, EESL and NDMC signed an MoU to install public e-charging stations at 100 places by March-end. The initiative has been undertaken to collaborate on promoting electric vehicles (including two-wheelers) in the NDMC area.

“These DC charges will help in charging a four-wheeler in 90 minutes and the vehicle would give a mileage of 80 km. The cost of charging will be Rs 6.9 to Rs 9.2 per kilowatt. Consumer can choose their nearest charging station using NDMC app 311. These would be in addition to the charging station plan for e-scooters,” Kumar said.

First Published: Jan 10, 2019 16:01 IST