A Smart Prepaid Energy Metering System to Control Electricity Theft

Abstract

In this Smart Prepaid Energy Metering System to Control Electricity Theft, a meter is installed in every consumer unit and a server is maintained at the service provider side. Both the meter and the server are equipped with GSM module which facilitates bidirectional communication between the two ends using the existing GSM infrastructure. Consumers can easily recharge their energy meter by sending a PIN number hidden in a scratch card to the server using SMS. The bidirectional GSM communication using SMS ensures the effectiveness of these measures.

Electricity theft has emerged as a serious problem in power sectors especially in the developing countries. A huge amount of revenue is lost due to electricity theft. In some countries this is so severe that governments are incurring losses instead of revenue. In some cases government has to provide subsidies to the power sector to maintain a reasonable price of electricity. The financial loss results in shortage of funds for investments to expand the existing power capacity and as a result governments are failing to satisfy the ever increasing demand of electricity.

Stealing electricity bypassing a meter, billing irregularities and unpaid bills. Billing irregularities comprise inaccurate meter reading taken by bribed service man and intentional fixing of the bill by office staffs in exchange of illicit payments from the consumer. Different non-technical and technical methods were proposed in the past to detect electricity pilfering. Some of the technical ways to detect pilferage are use of central observer meter at secondary terminals of distribution transformer, harmonic generator, genetic support vector machines, extreme learning machine, and power line impedance technique.

In the proposed system the power utility maintains a server and each consumer are provided an energy meter. The energy meter consists of a Microcontroller (ARM7), GSM module, current transformers, potential transformers, LCD display and a relay. The Microcontroller calculates the

energy consumption by counting the output of current and potential transformers on an interrupt basis. The household meter then receives the corresponding unit and is activated. As the user consumes energy, the corresponding units are deducted from the total balance and the remaining units are displayed.