With only about 2.3 crore smart electricity meters ticking across India, the country is nowhere near its targeted 25-crore installations by March 2026.
In December, a parliamentary panel urged the power ministry to expedite the roll-out of the smart meters, even while observing that funds utilisation remained ‘sub-optimal’.
A survey of more than 5,000 consumers in Jaipur, conducted by Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, showed that their concerns were ‘mostly about the accuracy of smart meters and the consequent impact on their electricity bills’, in contrast to the worries over data privacy and security in developed countries.
In India, there have been protests against smart meters by users who claimed that their bill amounts increased post installation; connections were automatically cut off if the bill was not paid. Smart meters bill more accurately than the old, electromechanical meters.
Dynamic tariffs
Smart meters, critical for the financial health of electricity utilities, enable the roll-out of dynamic tariffs based on supply bottlenecks and to nudge a change in consumer behaviour patterns. Smart meters also alert consumers about wasteful use of energy. The smart meter’s optimal performance depends on factors such as metering (measurement of electricity consumption); communications (conveying meter data to a utility’s server); and integration of data with applications such as billing, customer care, and apps that help with analytics.
Multiple delays
“The slow pace of smart meter roll-out is due to multiple factors,” says Reji Pillai, president of India Smart Grid Forum. “Several companies have taken years for implementation because they didn’t get everything right at the start,” he adds.
Connected metering
The smart electricity meters installed so far have been programmed to send data to the server in 96 blocks of 15 minutes each.
The meter data collected in the utility’s software system can be linked to a mobile phone app, through which discoms can communicate with the consumer.
About 2 crore of the 2.3 crore installed meters run on the metering-as-a-service model.
The Indian government offers discoms a grant to incentivise contractors (advanced metering infrastructure or AMI service provider) at ₹900 per meter or 15 per cent of project cost (whichever is lower). The balance of the product and service cost is equated across 93 months, which the discoms pay to the service providers — this is not charged from the consumers. Service providers charge discoms roughly $1 per meter per month.
“Studies on smart meter acceptance in developing countries highlight the interplay between socio-economic factors, technological infrastructure, and government policies,” notes the Princeton University study.
In India, between 2009 and 2013, the power ministry awarded 14 smart grid pilot projects across the country under the Restructured Accelerated Power Development and Reforms Programme (R-APDRP). Pillai says there were delays galore even in implementing small segments of the project — when companies were tendered to supply and install 5,000 to 20,000 smart meters, it “took 4-5 years to implement, though companies had agreed to do it in 18-24 months”.
The use of 3G communication technology in smart meters added to the sector’s woes. “When the country moved beyond 3G technology, meters that used 3G were made to fall back upon 2G, which had its own problems,” he says. The Revamped Distribution Sector Scheme was conceived in 2019, and it set the 25-crore smart meter target for 2026. The Covid pandemic slowed down the roll-out quite a bit.
Prepaid vs postpaid
Also, the decision to set all smart meters to operate as ‘prepaid’ meters, despite objections from most stakeholders, further slowed matters. A smart meter can be programmed to operate as post-paid or prepaid. Nowhere in the world have smart meters been installed purely as prepaid meters, without giving consumers a choice, Pillai observes.
“About 75 per cent of revenue comes from high-value customers — those with connections in megawatt scale and pay crores of rupees per month. There is no way prepayment would work for them; nor is there any technology for a remote-controlled meter attached to a MW-scale connection,” he says.
The standard bidding document (SBD) prepared for the smart metering programme was good. The standardised process, and use of common specifications across states, helped bring down the price of the smart metering system. But the errors that crept in along the way included multiple changes to the SBD — “it has undergone changes 12 or 13 times.”
Then came the programme of empanelling vendors and contractors, many of whom had little or no exposure to the smart metering ecosystem. Such choices and the involvement of agencies with no prior experience have slowed the pace of installations, Pillai notes.
Consensus is now growing among utilities and other stakeholders that the prepaid-only option was a mistake. Observers hope that the future could be of postpaid meters.
Assam, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar are among the states with a better offtake of smart meters.
