Prepaid Energy Meter Using Smart Cards

Prepaid Energy Meter using Smart Cards is a competent scheme of electricity billing. By the time it came in; it has been beneficial to consumers and power plants in terms of proceeds and power sector reforms.

How it works

Power consumed is shown by these energy meters in form of one unit or one kilo watt hour of energy consumed. while one kWh refers to the electrical energy required to provide 1000 watts of power for every 1 hour. The units of energy consumed are detected by the energy meter and show the amount of power consumed in form of energy units. However, the Energy meters are of two types – Electromechanical Meters and Electronic meters. For both the meters the reading is done from left to right.

While this meter consists of an aluminum disc which is positioned linking two electromagnets, in one of whose coil is connected to the load, and it is the current coil and the other coil of the electromagnet is connected to the supply voltage. The interaction of the fluxes between the two coils; and it is responsible for providing a torque to the disc, that starts rotating with the revolutions relative to the load current. While the counter records the number of revolutions and displays them. this help to indicate the energy consumed.

Electronic meters

Electronic meters are the meters which consist of current and voltage sensors which can sense the amount of power and voltage consumed. While the analog signal is sampled and digitized using ADCs. However, these digital signals are then processed using a DSP or a Microcontroller, which then displays the amount of energy consumed by a LED or an LCD display.

Need for Prepaid Energy Meter System

The predictable method of electricity billing involves a person from the distribution who performs unit reading; which is checking the number of units of electricity consumed in the energy meter, and convey the same information to the distribution unit and then prepare the bill according to the units consumed for a fixed amount of time. This can prove quite boring or time-consuming work as it involves various tasks like reading, then preparing the bill. But, this can't assure you the complete as there may be some errors in human reading. Even though the digital meters are being replaced with conventional electromechanical meters and provide many accurate readings, there is still a problem of deliberately making a false reading. Regardless of this, the task of billing for every consumer is a time-consuming job for the distribution network. Also, the consumer can deliberately consume more amount of power than required and still refrain from paying the bill and nothing can be done in some scenarios to severe the electric power supply. To eliminate such problems, the most convenient method is making the whole system prepaid similar to a mobile phone recharge or like DTH recharge.

While the prepayment metering system had improved its operational efficiencies, reduced financial risks and provides better customer service. Factors that can impact the initiative are Customer behavior, Initial investment, rapid technology changes, uncertainty over success. You can see this technology happening in many countries and they have come up with Prepaid Energy Meter using Smart Cards.

Defining a Prepaid Energy Meter System

Basically like in a mobile phone recharge, the consumer buys a recharge card and gets some energy units in return for the balance amount. This balance amount will keep reducing for every unit of energy consumed and once it is zero, the power supply would be automatically cut off. While the amount deducted for every unit of energy consumed can be controlled by the distribution unit as per the peak hours.

Advantages of this method are:

• It is highly accurate as the whole idea of reading the units and then adding them to a bill manually or any other source is eliminated.
• The consumer cannot break out from paying the due and the State Electricity Board will be free out debts.
• On the consumer front, the boring task of paying bills and waiting anxiously for the bill is eliminated.
• Wastage of energy is diminished as now only the required energy will be consumed as allotted.
• The power grid can monitor the overall energy consumption and any tampering attempts are actually of no use and can be detected if still prevalent.