Metering India

Metering India took place in New Delhi from 16th to 19th October2007, the first such event in India organized by the same people who organize the massively popular Metering Europe and many other events. The participation was good, but had expected a better / more senior set of speakers, better participation from the Industry and senior level participation from the government.

The key aspect that was good to hear and at the same time worrying was the intend of the APDRP II scheme to spend quite a bit of money on IT, with detailed specifications that is being drafted with the help of the Industry and major players in IT. It do augur well for IT in power. However the emphasis on too much IT also is a concern, since issues like how will the Utility manage such IT infrastructure, will there be adequate trained man-power interested to work for a utility, can outsourced model work, how the business process re-engineering be handled which is almost always required for large scale IT implementations to make sense and whether the detailed 500+ page specifications being drafted will stiffle innovation and Utility buy in as the previous grant driven APDRP - I has shown, all exist.


At the policy level, i do believe that specific areas of modernization should be focussed on, and it can off-course be IT. However a detailed document, going into aspects like VPN, leased line speed etc., seems to be an overkill. Also, the consultants required to handle such projects are retained as the existing consultants namely, NTPC, PGCIL and CPRI. That is the other serious worry, since the IT strategy for different distribution companies shall be different and should be driven from within with IT experts which need not necessarily be these companies. It is always better to have 3rd party independent consultants for such projects.

The conference did have an interesting facet to the standards versus proprietary protocol discussion, which almost always lighten up the metering discussion in India. The proposal from the CPRI speaker with regards to the proprietary focus stalling innovation in India was strongly shouted down by the metering lobby led by Secure Meters. The Indian metering industry is being controlled by a few manufacturers like Secure and L&T and they are strongly opposing the adoption of standard protocols in India at the meter end, and are proposing an alternative XML based standard at the meter reading end, with API of meter manufacturer drivers and XML files. The utility NDPL which is the major user of this solution stated that meter download takes 5 to 30 minutes and they are doing this only once in 2 months. This surely question the ROI claims for the more than 5 Million USD investment by NDPL.

There is a strong need for standard and open meter end and metering and billing software end protocols. It is important that we do not invest in cleaning up some proprietary protocols in every project, and the market is available to only a few vendors. The most important requirement of the Indian utilities is to have a mechanism whereby they can invest in software to improve their theft detection, metering, billing and detailed MIS for their operations. However, the lack of open protocol, the control of the sector by a few players and the utilities lack of will power in handling the metering lobby are some of the key drivers forcing the indian metering industry to lag in technology and standard adoption and thereby benefit truly from AMR and AMI initiatives happening globally.

An open protocol is as much a right of the utility as the RTI Act is to an individual in India approaching the government. The data in the meter is utilities property and the utility can very well request that the data be made available in the protocol it chooses. The Indian industry should open its protocol, adopt an international protocol like DLMS or atleast work towards building a new Indian Standard Protocol and this will happen only if the Utilities stands together and drive the effort. Meter is where all of utilities revenues are being generated. However, if the Utility itself cannot dictate the protocol that is used to read/write it does not augur well for this sectors future and technology adoption & productivity increase in future.

In most countries, where proprietary protocols are being used, the Utility do have access and control to those protocols so that the Utility is not at the mercy of the vendor. Thus in India there is a strong case for moving towards a standard and open protocol.

The fact that Indian representatives on the IEC TC13 committee's for metering are not pushing India centric requirements, and actively lobbying for the Indian cause can only be because of their belief that India is different from the world. It is never so. In the rapidly globalizing world, open and standard protocols is always going to be the competitive edge for all companies. Proprietary protocols are a boon for the incumbent, but history has shown that it is not a long lasting advantage and vanishes fast. There is a strong case for India to re-activate its mirror committee's in power system domain, make it an active debating ground for people across the country and drive the Indian standardization process in power systems aligning with international bodies, with distinct Indian features added in if required.

Resources:

Open protocol in the Indian context and applicability of DLMS
Meteringindia.com - mios - Meter Interoperability Solution
DLMS COSEM - The Infrastructure of liberalization