Reliance Jio Plans To Install Smart Electricity Meters For 25 Crore Indians Using Internet Of Things
Reliance Industries Limited is planning on foraying into the smart electricity meter market.
Read on to know more about RIL’s plans…
What is the Smart Meter Programme?
A smart meter is an electronic device that communicates both ways; to the consumers for greater clarity of consumption behavior, and electricity suppliers for system monitoring and customer billing.
Advantages of Smart Meters-
- Two-way communication
- Control center equipment
- Monitor the electric system in near real-time
- Enables dynamic pricing
- Minimizes human intervention in metering, billing, and collection
- Helps reduce theft by identifying loss pockets.
The government has been trying to push the implementation of smart meters to reduce losses for quite some time now.
In India, currently, the world’s largest electricity smart metering program is in progress.
The proposed Rs 3.5 trillion ‘Reforms Linked Result Based Scheme for Distribution’ targets at completing the compulsory smart metering ecosystem across all distribution points, right from electricity feeders to the consumer levels.
India’s smart meter programme mainly aims to cut the distribution losses.
In her budget speech this year, Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman had said, “I urge all the states and Union territories to replace 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.”
The smart meters, the key to the success of the scheme, will also replace 250 million conventional meters. This in turn will help raise annual revenues to ?1.38 trillion aiding the debt-laden electricity distribution companies (discoms).
RIL’s Plans For Smart Meter Programme!
At the same time, RIL is eyeing the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) business and looking into to offer these services through Narrow Band-Internet of Things (NB-IoT).
Developed by 3GPP, a standards organization, NB-IoT is a Low Power Wide Area Network radio technology. It enables a wide range of cellular devices and services.
One of the two people with knowledge in the matter said while requesting anonymity, “Some of the services on offer by RIL include meter data collection, communication cards, telecom and cloud hosting services.”
Jio Platforms Ltd, subsidiary of RIL, has already expanded in sectors such as cloud and edge computing, data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, blockchain, and the internet of things (IoT).
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