By A Staff Reporter
Kathmandu, Aug. 10: Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA) has started replacing existing household single-phase meter of its customers with smart ones.
Minister for Energy, Water Resource and Irrigation Barshaman Pun inaugurated the smart metre installation programme by replacing the single-phase meter in the Ward office of Bhudhanilkantha Municipality-9 on Sunday.
According to the NEA, around 5 million customers are now using the single-phase meters. In the first phase, the NEA is planning to install around 100,000 smart metres replacing the single-phase and the three-phase metres of the customers under Ratna Park and Maharajgunj distribution centres.
With the starting of installing smart metering machines, the NEA’s plan to go digital has entered into the implementation phase.
After the installation of the smart meters, the employees of the NEA need not to visit the houses of customers for meter reading. As the smart metre flows the data of electricity consumption to both NEA office and customers metre, it will enable the NEA to cut the line of the customers from its office for not paying bill.
It will also enable the NEA to control electricity theft as it informs any attempt made by customers to steal the electricity bypassing the meter. Moreover, it will also help control demand leakage by allowing only the use of metre-integrated loads.
On the occasion, Minister Pun said that the installation of smart meters would be a milestone to realise the objective of the government to make the service of the government authorities efficient and modern.
“We are also working to maintain the beauty of capital city and other major cities and make the supply system reliable and effective by carrying electricity wires underground,” Minister Pun, who is also the chairman of board of directors of the NEA, said.
“We have reduced the electricity tariff for the first time in history and establish the NEA as one of the highest profit earning institutions for two years,” Pun said.
Secretary of the Ministry Dinesh Kumar Ghimire said that the progress on implementation of the smart grid and smart meter installation project of the NEA included in the white paper issued two years ago was encouraging.
Kulman Ghising, executive director of NEA, said that the use of smart metre would help reduce the number of staff by around 2,500 to 3,000 in the future.
Ghising said that installation of smart meters would enable the NEA to charge different tariff to its customers based on the peak, off-peak and normal hours. “As we are soon going to be in surplus production during monsoon, we could encourage the consumption by reducing tariff during the season while we can charge high tariff during the dry season,” Ghising said.
He said that smart meters could be made pre-paid and post-paid and its tariff could be paid online from anywhere.
In the first phase, the NEA has converted 8,222 time of day (TOD) meters into smart meters and the process of converting 125,000 three-phase whole current meters into smart ones is in progress. The authority has started installing smart metres to the new customers of three-phase.
The cost of installation of smart metres in place of single-phase meters is estimated to be Rs. 1 billion. Asian Development Bank is funding the project by providing a soft loan. The NEA has forwarded a bidding process for the replacement of 400,000 single-phase meters in the Kathmandu Valley with smart meter.