Commentary from Mr. Sanjay Kumar Mittal – Senior Director, Eninrac
National Smart Grid Mission has been established by Govt. of India vide MoP Office Memorandum dated 27.03.2015 to accelerate Smart Grid deployment in India. NSGM has been in operational since January 2016 with dedicated team. NSGM has its own resources, authority, functional & financial autonomy to plan and monitor implementation of the policies and programs related to Smart Grids in the country. Ajmer Vidyut Vitran Nigam Ltd. (AVVNL), Rajasthan, project became the first successful pilot project to demonstrate benefits of Smart Grid functionalities viz. AMI for automatic energy audit and loss reduction analytics which includes energy theft monitoring and tamper alerts. A case study on the pilot project in AVVNL for 1,000 consumers on single feeder for the period of 6 months starting October 2016, highlighted the following benefits to the DISCOM and the consumers:
- Improved customer satisfaction level with accurate billing, real time consumption information, outage notification (with mobile app)
- Real-time detection and recording of outages, reduced equipment failure- faster fault detection and restoration
- Outage time reduction by 20%
- Reduction in failure rate of meters by 50%
- Reduction in failure rate of transformers by 30%
- Automation of meter reading and meter punching with smart meter- removes cost of manual reading and punching
- Bill Generation Cycle Reduction from 14 Days to 5 Days
- Automatic DT wise energy audit identified high loss area for reducing losses
- AT&C loss reduction from 20% to 13.5%
As of March 2025, a total of 2,29,29,954 smart meters have been deployed in India. However, the total sanctioned & awarded smart meters till date stands to be 22,23,54,490 & 13,80,22,912.
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