RIL Forays in Smart Electricity Meter Business

Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) is eyeing the smart electricity meter market and plans to leverage its Jio business by offering meter data collection, communication cards, telecom and cloud hosting services to electricity distribution companies (discoms). This comes against the backdrop of the world’s largest electricity smart meter programme under way in India, with the aim of cutting distribution losses. India’s programme aims to replace 250 million conventional meters to help raise annual revenues of debt-laden discoms to ?1.38 trillion. The firm is looking at the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) business and is exploring offering these services through Narrow Band-Internet of Things (NB-IoT). Smart meters require a two-way communication network, control centre equipment and software applications for near real-time gathering and transfer of energy usage information. NB-IoT is a low-power wide-area network radio technology standard developed by 3GPP, a standards organization, to enable a wide range of cellular devices and services. Smart meters are key to the success of India’s proposed ?3.5 trillion distribution reform scheme— “Reforms Linked Result Based Scheme for Distribution"—that calls for completing compulsory smart metering ecosystem across the distribution sector starting from electricity feeders to the consumer levels. Analysts say the Indian power sector is witnessing a steady transformation towards digitization and the smart meter’ efficacy was proven during the national lockdown resulting in an increase of average monthly revenue per consumer as compared to the problems faced by conventional metering technology.