Smart meters are electronic meters that provide real-time analytics on electricity usage data which enables efficient management of electrical energy. These smart meters help increase the profitability of power utilities. Simultaneously, they help consumers reduce wastage and optimise their energy consumption. Rising to this new trend, many smart manufacturing companies in India are coming up with innovative smart meters to improve India’s energy industry.
Here are the top benefits of smart meters.
1. Tracking Energy Consumption:
Consumers can accurately track their energy consumption patterns with the help of smart meters. They can spot problem appliances that consume disproportionate amounts of energy. If need be, they can have them repaired for any such energy-wasting faults.
Consumers can this way make precious savings by optimising their energy usage and cutting down on any wasteful consumptions.
2. Reduced Outages:
Smart meters help utility companies in grid balancing and optimising energy generation. Power utilities have always faced issues with voltage and load fluctuations resulting from volatile changes in demand depending on the season, time or special events. Smart meters help them better manage their assets with lower idle time and a lesser number of overload cases.
This means that there would be fewer incidents of power outages and sudden breakdowns. Consumers can enjoy a seamless undisrupted electricity supply.
3. Automated Billing:
Smart meters help energy companies cut down costs by making billing fully automated. They can set up automatic payments to reduce the number of defaulting customers.
Moreover, smart meters enable these companies to put a cap on the maximum energy extractable by a particular consumer. These can help reduce cases of over usage and “power thefts”. Such incidences are a big problem in India causing huge losses to energy companies every year. The best smart meter supplier in the market would even let the power utilities disconnect the energy supply by remotely operating their smart meter in case of such incidents.
4. Reduce Tampering:
Power thefts are the bane of the Indian electrical industry. One of the main methods that people steal electricity from the grid is by tampering with their energy meters.
In the past, the old static energy meters provided no safeguards against such unethical practices. Smart meters made by Techovn, though, are very successful at detecting such attempts at illegal tampering.
Their in-built tampering protection mechanism responds to tampering attempts quickly. They also send real-time notifications to the power company. This enables the utilities to take timely rear-guard action by setting manual processes into action immediately.
5. Remote Location Metering:
Innovative smart meter manufacturers provide group metering solutions. With these, it is possible to measure electrical consumption for three households with a single smart meter installation. These help power utilities cut costs and manage metering in remote locations much better.
6. Upgrades:
Smart meters are connected devices relying on many of the core principles of IoT technology. Their firmware can be updated remotely periodically. These keep these smart meters always upgraded with the latest software releases and bug fixes enabling powerful and reliable performance.
7. Customise Plans:
Modern customers are not satisfied with only picking off-the-shelf solutions. They look for customised solutions as per their particular needs. Smart meters enable power utilities to provide their customers with customised plans. Customers can choose to be billed on a pre-paid or post-paid basis. They can also avail of the net-metering billing functionality.
Smart metering solutions are a win-win proposition for both the power utilities and the customers. Many good smart meter manufacturers are now producing these smart meters in large quantities to make India’s energy usage efficient and cost-effective.
