Delivering India’s first smart grid pilot for 22,000 consumers

To deliver quality power to consumers at a competitive price, an Indian utility company launched the first-ever smart-grid pilot on the country's distribution network.

Enzen was chosen as the systems integrator for the pilot. The project's objectives were to integrate new technology with legacy applications like SCADA, and reduce the amount of human intervention needed in the maintenance of the grid. Technologies deployed included:

• Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI)
• Outage Management System (OMS)
• Peak Load Management (PLM)
• Agricultural DSM (Ag DSM)
• Renewable Integration
• Analytics and Visualization.

Enzen supplied, installed, tested and commissioned a smart metering system for 22,000 consumers across the residential, commercial, industrial and agricultural sectors. The end-to-end solution covered 10% of the city and 14 feeders coming from five substations. The solution included:

• Field hardware such as smart meters, transformer monitoring units, communicable fault passage indicators and data loggers
• An integrated control and command centre with required MDAS, MDM and PLM software, plus associated hardware
• Visualisation, analytics and reporting for an efficient decision support system
• Integration with legacy applications to minimise human intervention in the grid.

Thanks to the smart grid system, the customer is now using its assets more effectively and can plan, control and improve its operations more quickly and further ahead.

The distribution company has reduced its peak load consumption, introduced automated meter reading and billing, decreased Aggregate Technical & Commercial (AT&C) losses, improved its load forecasting and is now remotely connecting and disconnecting its meters.

Consumers have the opportunity and incentive to be more energy efficient, while commercial and industrial consumers are using demand response programmes to help reduce peak load consumption.

Since the pilot was launched, the network’s transformer failure rate has decreased by 4%. Data analysis is identifying which transformers need replacing and monitoring consumer usage more accurately. The project is also a demonstration of Enzen’s ability to deliver all functionalities of a smart grid system, plus seamless integration with legacy systems like SCADA.