Power consumers in the city will soon have the luxury of uninterrupted power supply as work on the Distribution Automation System (DAS) of the Bangalore Electricity Supply Company (BESCOM) is being carried out on a war footing.
The Rs 563 crore project will be the country’s biggest automation system which will cover 900 11kV feeders and over 35 lakh consumers.
What BESCOM can then promise is fault response times of between 1 and 2 minutes as power will be restored to healthy sections automatically even before fault detection begins. This will be made possible by a centralised control and automation centre which will be in touch with all field equipment.
The project, which was slated for completion in March 2014, is currently in its implementation phase and according to officials, the installation of new cables and other units is being carried out. The design for the control centre systems are underway and the communication systems have been tested.
Another BESCOM project under the Restructured Accelerated Power Development and Reform Programme (R-APDRP) of the Union Power Ministry is scheduled to be completed by January next year. The part A of the project, which includes 17 modules, deals with consumer and infrastructure mapping as well as energy audits. The project is being handled by Infosys and Reliance Infrastructure Limited, who are consultants.
“The module dealing with financial aspects like metering, billing and collection is expected to be finished by this month or early October. Bangalore is the biggest city in India for the R-APDRP project,” said Managing Director Pankaj Kumar Pandey.
He said that issues with the consultants on connectivity and software were being sorted out. The project will also help BESCOM conduct an energy audit and single out non performing feeders. “There will be some procedural changes required for energy audit. We will introduce those soon. We plan a full roll out of entire part A (17 modules) by January next year,” Pandey added.