Smart Metering Solutions for City Gas Distribution Company

Abstract

Indraprastha Gas Limited (IGL) is supplying piped natural gas to approx. 7.0 lac domestic customers and more than 2800 Industrial and Commercial (I&C) customers in Delhi and NCR. The biggest challenge before any City Gas Distribution (CGD) company is to do the accurate & timely billing of its large customer base which is geographically distributed in wide spread area. Traditionally Bimonthly billing is performed of domestic customer segment. A meter reader visits every domestic customer in its bimonthly billing cycle to get the meter reading. Once the meter reading is collected it is punched in SAP for final billing. All the process is done manually i:e from meter reading collection to Final billing. Manual meter reading collection process is very time consuming and prone to errors. Errors includes reading estimation, wrong reading, manual error and House lock problem. Due to such errors there is monthly reversals done in domestic, I&C segment which is approximately 7 lac SCM/month. Other than that there are issues like not 100% customers get billed. This inaccurate billing have financial impact on Gas reconciliation of any CGD. In order to overcome the Billing related issues in Domestic, Industrial and Commercial segment Automated Meter Reading technology has been implemented in IGL. In this paper in depth study on the various AMR technologies is presented. Author has tried to cover all the pros and Cons of available AMR solutions. Automated Metering Infrastructure (AMI) and AMR solutions presented here are Walk By solution, Drive By solution, Fixed Concentrator type solution, Optical character based solution, And AMR with prepaid solution. Usability, efficacy and requirement of all the above AMR solutions in accord with a CGD is discussed in this paper.