CHENNAI: Residents of T Nagar will soon have an advantage with faster restoration of power during outages and ability to monitor and manage power consumption with installation of ‘smart meters’ for 1.25 lakh residents under the Smart City initiative.
The total cost to provide the instruments to 1.25 lakh consumers works out to Rs 112.75 crore and Tangedco has sought the sum for implementing the project.
It is learnt that Tangedco wants to implement smart meters with advanced infrastructure system under Chennai Smart City scheme at T Nagar and Area Based Development (ABD) on mixed or hybrid communication technology. With the use of smart meters, power utilities like Tangedco can manage power distribution more efficiently to avoid overloading to the grid and blackouts that follow.
Under the project, the advanced metering infrastructure will include information technology hardware and software for Tangedco data centre in Chennai. Smart meters use low-energy radio frequency waves to transmit information across distances.
Sources indicated that the cost benefit of deploying advanced metering infrastructure for 1.25 lakh consumers works out to Rs 20.14 crore per annum and the proposed investment of Rs 112.75 crore will be recovered in nearly five to six years.
The bigger challenge, however, has been the funds available for the Smart City proposal. Official sources told Express that since the entire Smart City proposal had been restricted to Rs 1,000 crore, the allocation for this project is restricted to Rs 50 crore and the rest would be funded by Tangedco.
“Since the cost of the project is above Rs 25 crore, the administrative sanction now has to be accorded by High Power Project Sanctioning Committee,” sources added.
How smart meters will benefit Tangedco
For consumers