The Hindu Business Line : Power solutions

Minimising the human effort of collection and analysis of power consumption data through an IT-enabled environment will bring in the much-needed transparency and accountability to the power sector. Data accuracy will improve and so will revenues. Efforts are needed to bring in this change across all levels of consumption.

To put in place an IT-enabled accounting system, as the editorial “Accounting for power” suggests (Business Line, September 22), there should be a innovative tariff mechanism with inbuilt incentives for the consumer. An instance is that of group accounting. Most multi-storied apartment blocks have a dedicated transformer (if not more).

Each of these transformers can be metered and reconciled with the energy consumed as measured through the individual meter recordings to record the losses.

Allowing for technical losses, the rest of the losses shall be recovered from all the consumers at a flat rate. Today, technology is available to make this whole effort automatic and with minimum human interface. Once the system is established, a housing society’s representative (or the local representative of the commercial street) can themselves tally and zero in on the reasons for losses. To start this entire exercise, simple and easily understandable tariff models are needed.

Today the tariff for, say, TNEB is uniform across the State for identified slabs and factors in the aggregate commercial and technical losses as allowed by the regulator.

One should put in special efforts to educate the consumer after launching such an incentivised scheme.

V. Balakrishnan e-mail