If all goes as per the Chandigarh Administration’s plan, electricity department officials sitting in their control room will be able to make real-time detections of meter tampering. The plan is to install ‘smart’ meters that will send tamper alerts immediately to the control room, which will have a remote power shut-off capability. The proposed system will also enable the department to keep tabs on daily individual usage, peak demand, load profile, voltage, voltage profile and outage counts of each user from their office. Under the smart grid project, the department will introduce advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), an integrated system of smart meters, data management and communication system that will enable communication between consumers and the department. UT superintending engineer M P Singh said that AMI would enable them to monitor power consumption of each consumer from the control room. “It will help in improving billing efficiency, monitoring of load and reporting of meter tempering,” said Singh. For improving power supply, distribution transformer monitoring units (DTMU) will be installed for spotting of faults and prevention of transformer failure. For the past few years, overloading of the transformers has been more than 95% during peak summer season, which is in violation of the Joint Electricity Regulatory Commission (JERC) guidelines. The norms say that the load on transformers cannot be more than 80% of their capacity. Sub-station automation system (SAS) will also be implemented by using computerised functions of monitoring, control and taking preventive actions. Following directions of the Union Ministry of Power, the Power Grid has prepared a detailed project report (DPR) and will assist the electricity department in execution of the project. The department has picked sub-division number 5 (Industrial Area) — comprising urban, rural and commercial consumers — for implementing the system on a pilot basis, which will cost around Rs 50 crore. Singh said that sub-division 5 was selected for the pilot project as it comprises mix of all consumers and the maximum revenue of the department, that is, 25%, comes from this division. The system will be introduced in the remaining part of the city later. The DPR will be forwarded to the power ministry after getting approval from the administrator. The meeting is scheduled to be held next week. The electricity department caters to a total of 2.12 lakh consumers, out of which 1.75 lakh are in the domestic category. Of the total, there is regular billing of around 94% of consumers.
