To ensure better energy accounting and reduce Aggregate Technical & Commercial (AT&C) losses the government is going to start a fresh initiative of metering distribution transformers and feeder lines across the country, Union Minister for Power and Renewable Energy RK Singh told Moneycontrol in an interview on April 13.
“One target I have set is that by March 2024, all feeder lines and distribution transformers will have to be metered because that is necessary for energy accounting. The days of irresponsibility are over. Every bit of energy is going to be accounted for. Power utilities will have to publish quarterly accounts and annual accounts,” Singh said.
As of date, about 40 percent of distribution transformer metering has been done and for feeder lines, the status is a bit better at about 80 percent, he said.
Under the Revamped Distribution Sector Scheme (RDSS) of the government, the plan is not just to tackle consumer metering, but also to ensure system metering. While the consumer smart metering drive will take some time due to manufacturing constraints and has been targeted for completion by March 2026, the system metering initiative has now been mandated to be completed within a year by all power discoms.
The minister said doing this will help fix accountability. "If AT&C losses are happening, they are happening in which division, which circle, who are the executive engineer and superior officer responsible for that loss - all this will have to be accounted for. If I gave you, say, 1,000 MW, but you could supply only 600 MW of it. Doing such a level of energy accounting will help utilities identify exactly how and where the 400 MW get pilfered. It will help identify high-loss pockets,” he said.
He said the government is also modernising its feeder monitoring system through which it keeps a check on feeders across the country.
Incidents of overcharging states on subsidy bills by discoms
The move, Singh said, would also help in bringing proper accounting to subsidy bills presented by distribution companies (discoms) to the states. He also said there have been instances where discoms have overcharged state governments in the name of subsidy bills.
“Earlier discoms did not even use to give any sort of bill and they would just mention any amount as a subsidy claim. But, now what we are doing is that the subsidy which will be billed to the state governments will be based on energy accounts,” the minister said.
As per provisional numbers provided by the government, AT&C's losses of power distribution utilities declined to 17 per cent in 2021-22 from 22 per cent in the previous year.
Reduction in AT&C losses improves finances of utilities (discoms), enabling them to better maintain the system and buy power as per requirement and benefit the consumers. The AT&C loss and ACS-ARR (Average Cost of Supply-Average Realizable Revenue) gap are key indicators of discoms’ performance.
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