Key Points:
- Reliance Industries Limited is planning on entering the Smart Electricity Meter business.
- This comes as a backdrop to India’s largest Smart Metering Programme.
- RIL is exploring on offering services of Advanced Meter Infrastructure through Narrow Band-Internet of Things.
- Smart meters help reduce losses and the Indian government has been urging for the state govts. to use it.
Ambani’s Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) is eyeing the smart electricity meter market. People requesting anonymity aware of the development told Livemint that, RIL is planning to leverage its Jio business to give meter data collection, communication cards, telecom and cloud hosting services to electricity distribution companies (discoms).
World’s Largest Electricity Smart Metering Programme is in progress in India which aims to cut distribution losses is said to be the framework of this plan. The Metering programme aims to substitute 250 million conventional meters to help increase annual revenues of debt-laden discoms to ₹1.38 trillion.
Exploring to offer services of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AIM) through Narrow Band-Internet of Things (NB-IoT), billionaire Mukesh Ambani led-firm is looking at it as a business. NB-IoT is a low-power wide-area network (WAN) radio technology standard developed by 3GPP, a standards organization, to permit aa extensive range of cellular devices and services.
Smart Meters:
- Require two-way communication network, control center equipment and software applications for near real-time gathering and transfer of energy usage information.
- These help in reducing losses.
- Minimize human intervention in metering, billing and collection.
- Helps reduce theft by recognizing loss pockets.
- These are key to the success of India’s proposed Rs. 3.5 trillion distribution reform schemes – “Reforms Linked Result Based Scheme for Distribution”.
The Reform Distribution System calls for accomplishing mandatory smart metering ecosystem across the distribution sector right from the electricity feeders till the consumer levels.
Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her budget speech earlier this year said,
“I urge all the states and Union territories to swap conventional energy meters by prepaid smart meters in the next three years. Also, this would give consumers the freedom to choose the supplier and rate as per their requirements.”
