The Problem with Conventional Energy Meters in Pakistan

Pakistan is currently facing energy crises as our generation lags behind demand. This is a problem almost every developing country face. In Pakistan mechanical energy meters were used in early distribution systems. These meters are prone to theft via many ways. Digital energy meter overcomes all those problems faced by conventional mechanical meters. Energy preservation is a huge problem in Pakistan as the theft of electricity is very common. The power sector faces a huge problem in revenue collection owing to the number of energy thefts and power losses.

One of the main reasons is the conventional method of billing which is mostly inaccurate, slow, man-power dependent, costly and above all unreliable. Most of the developed and developing countries are opting for this method of billing to refrain from nonpayment at the customer’s end. In Pakistan, meters implemented per house or areas are quite expensive. Their replacements in case of any fault are time taking and demand high expenses. Then there are several meter readers hired to take monthly readings of these meters which demand huge man-power. With the advancement in technology where machines are taking over much of the manual work of man. Demand of the hour in Pakistan is to introduce an automated system of billing for electricity which would conserve huge amount of electricity and would help regaining balance between energy consumption and energy production.

To improve the energy efficiency, consumers and suppliers need to be more aware of the energy consumption. With the advent of microcontrollers and Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM), the concept of smart energy meters has come into existence and the conventional energy meters have been replaced by the smart energy meters, which provide the solution to most of the metering problems. Smart energy meter overcomes these issues as the meter directly communicates with the utility and warns in case of theft.

Conventional energy meters are error prone, less efficient, time consuming and easy to tamper as well. It requires huge man-power for meter reading adding to the cost and Conventional meters can be tampered. The remedy for all these problems is to fabricate the GSM based with net metering function smart energy meter. The main purposes to design this smart energy meter is to enable power management authorities to remotely access the consumer’s energy consumption and theft monitoring. The net metering function allows the solar power generating domestic consumers to sale the surplus solar energy back to utility.