Smart meter tender elicits tremendous response

Around 100 companies participated in the pre-bid meeting of the mega tender for smart meters of Energy Efficiency Services Ltd held on August 22, a government release said. EESL, a Central public sector undertaking, had issued in July this year a mega tender for the procurement of 50 lakh smart energy meters to be deployed in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.

There are two reasons, apart from its sheer size, for this tender to be unique:

1. Bifurcation: The tender has been split into two parts – one for smart meters and the second for system integration. In other words, the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) project has been split into equipment (smart meters) and system integration. This is why the response has been encouraging. A pure smart meter manufacturer could bid for the equipment tender independent of whether the company is capable of system integration. EESL expects to float the tender for system integration in September. This has also made the project more affordable and also manageable for bidding companies.
2. Procuring agency: EESL will procure the smart meters and implement the project with its own investment. This means that discoms have been left out of the purview of the project. As EESL is the project implementing agency, bidders are more confident in participating in the tender. EESL will also maintain the project for ten years. EESL will recover its investment from the discoms, by way of commercial efficiency realized due to the smart meter rollout.

Overall benefits

The meters are being procured for implementation of smart grid projects in the states of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. These meters will help these states in not only significantly reducing their AT&C losses way of increased billing efficiency, but will completely change the way in which electrical energy is presently being consumed and paid for by the ordinary consumers.

Installation of these smart meters along with its associated communication and IT infrastructure will enable the discoms to obtain real time energy consumption data of each consumer for subsequent analysis and will pave the way for initiating various smart measures by discoms like time-of-day metering, 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. Installation of these meters will also obviate the need for manual recording of meter reading at the consumer’s premise.

(Photo shows a smart meter installation as part of Power Grid Corporation of India’s pilot Smart Grid project at Puducherry.)