Adani Energy Solutions aims to grab a market share of 25 per cent in smart meters taking an integrated approach towards the entire business value chain to retain complete control over the rollout as well as end-user experience.

The company currently has an order book of close to two crore smart meters from discoms like BEST Mumbai (11 lakh), Maharashtra discom (1.15 crore), Uttarakhand (6 lakh ), Andhra Pradesh (41 lakh), Bihar (28 lakh) and Assam (8 lakh). Its distribution arm Adani Electricity Mumbai has already installed a majority of its 7 lakh smart meters planned in the first phase.

With the government mandating transitioning to a complete Smart Metering system for all the 25 crore premises in the next five to seven years, this segment has thrown open a big revenue opportunity, which the company plans to cash in on to take a quarter of the total market share.

DBFOOT contract

“As it (the smart metering business) is a 10-year DBFOOT (Develop, Built, Fund, Own, Operate, and Transfer) contract, technology and vendor obsolescence are real risks over the project lifecycle,”  said Chief Executive Officer Kandarp Patel. 

“To de-risk, we plan to in-source as much as possible. Towards this, we have invested a lot in selecting the right tech partners across the value chain right from the meter manufacturer to HES and MDM (Head End System, Meter Data Management) systems, to telco, to the integration of software vendor, to the cloud hosting service provider, and right up to the consumer app,” he added.

The key elements of a smart meter rollout are – the physical meter, a secure communication link between the meter and the discom, trained manpower for installation and trouble-shooting, HES & MDM for controlling meters, a secure cloud network where this data is stored and analysed by the discoms, and a consumer app enabling them to pay bills, analyse consumption pattern, and receive communication from the discoms.

Esyasoft Holdings JV

Recently the company announced setting up a JV with UAE-based Esyasoft Holdings to implement smart metering projects in India and other countries. Esyasoft is a provider of cloud and IoT-based energy management solutions for smart utilities. Besides serving Adani Energy’s current and future needs, the JV will also be a gateway for its global ambitions in the smart metering business. It has also signed up with Airtel to deploy Airtel’s IoT platform - ‘Airtel IoT Hub,’ for smart meter tracking and monitoring with analytics, diagnostic capabilities, and real-time insights and services.

To have a much larger control and visibility over the entire chain, Adani Energy has tied up with sister firms like AdaniConneX for local data hosting and Adani Digital Labs for customising the consumer app and is also evaluating extending some more vendor partnership models by acquiring an equity stake in them. 

While the bid winner gets 27 months to complete the rollout, Adani Energy is confident of fast-tracking the installation, given its focus on backward integration and insourcing.

Smart meters enable two-way communication between the discom and individual electricity meters and have several advantages over analog ones. The discoms can manage their cash flows much better, and the meters also allow more accurate billing based on actual consumption. With real-time data collection, the discoms can plan their power purchase better. 

“Discoms will be able to identify and plug leakage in electricity metering. As per our study, if the distribution losses are brought down by only 1.5 to 2 percentage points, the entire cost of installing the smart meters would be met. We have studies to show that transmission and distribution losses can be brought down to single digits from the existing 30-35 per cent in some circles,” said Patel.

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