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Haryana And Uttar Pradesh Close To Enter Smart Power Grid With 50-Lakh Smart Power Meter Tender

EES had put out a mega tender for procurement of 50 lakh smart meters in July.



Electricity power lines stand in the countryside in Sizewell, near Leiston, U.K. (Photographer: Jason Alden/Bloomberg)
Electricity power lines stand in the countryside in Sizewell, near Leiston, U.K. (Photographer: Jason Alden/Bloomberg)

State-run Energy Efficiency Services Ltd. (EESL) has received interest bids from nearly 100 companies for its procurement tender of 50 lakh smart power meters for setting up smart grid projects in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, the power ministry has said.

A pre-bid meeting was held on August 22, for which EESL had put out a tender last month, the ministry said in a statement on Friday.

Implementing smart meters is one of the operational performance parameters of Centre’s Ujwal Discom Assurance Yojana (UDAY) scheme.

The ministry said that the meters will help in reducing significant aggregate technical and commercial losses and reduce power theft.

The website of UDAY shows that only 98,264 units or 2 percent of the target for installing smart meters above 500 kWH has been acheived in financial year 2016-17. The target was of installing 48,77,484 smart meters.

Also, only 0.8 percent of the target has been met for installing smart meters above 200 kWH and up to 500 kWH. Only 1,32,451 smart meters were installed as against the target of 1,71,82,636 in FY17.

Both these figures are for 20 states in India which are a part of UDAY scheme.

In order to make the entire project feasible and affordable, EESL has unbundled the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) project into two parts viz. procurement of smart meter and arranging the system integrator. EESL is also planning to issue the tender for selection of system integrator early next month, as second part of the AMI project.
Power Ministry Statement

The smart grid projects are aimed at providing uninterrupted power supply. The Ministry of Power has allocated 14 smart grid pilot projects that will be implemented by state-owned distribution utilities.

Installation of these smart meters will enable the power distribution companies to obtain real time energy consumption data of each consumer for subsequent analysis.

This will pave the way for initiating various smart measures like Time Of Day (TOD)/Time Of Use (TOU) billing, prediction and management of peak demand, providing real time energy consumption data to consumer, prepaid billing facility, remote connection and disconnection of load, accurate billing, etc.