In a bid to curtail the losses incurred by the ex-WAPDA distribution companies (DISCOs), the federal government has announced the installation of AMI (Advanced Metering of Infrastructure) meters on all the feeders suffering high losses by June 2023.
In this regard, a senior official of the Energy Ministry stated that in addition to feeders, the AMI system will also be installed on all commercial and industrial connections, bulk consumers, and one-point supply in decreasing the order of load. Installation of AMI meters would begin from feeders having the highest percentage of losses.
“This installation of a high-tech system without man intervention will help significantly reduce the pilferage of electricity and technical losses as the decades-old conventional method of energy audit & accounting principle has failed to precisely identify energy stealing consumers & technical loss areas,”?the officer said.
The official said that an independent autonomous directorate would be set up in this regard. Every DISCO would share the timeline of the completion of stated projects with a project director, other teams and the Power Division.
The official believed that the installation of the high-tech system will help eliminate electricity theft and technical losses because the conventional energy auditing system is incapable to figure out the areas of high energy losses.
The report further said that DISCOs would have no problem in outsourcing feeders and transformers when this system gets installed as this would help in correcting feeder coding and indexing consumersÂ’ reference numbers with the right transformer. This in turn would help DISCOs to take a meter reading through a real-time GMS technology as well as distantly disconnect the meter.
Moreover, the report mentioned that the DISCOs would coordinate with meter manufacturers and contractors in order to add specific features to the meters besides implementing AMI.
In 2009 and 2012, the official added the World Bank launched energy sector reform projects in Latin America, South Asia and East Asia for “sustainable optimal reduction of technical losses and elimination of non-technical losses”.