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Electricity Regulatory Commissions (ERCs) have decided to use more of an Electricity Supply Monitoring System (ESMS) to check the performance of distribution utilities. The said systems record voltage every minute at an installed location, sending the data to a central server.
This is on the heels of the Delhi government's recent proposal to the Delhi Electricity Regulatory Commission (DERC) to penalise distribution companies for any load shedding and poor quality. It had also asked DERC to compensate consumers for outages, by asking power utilities to deduct a penalty amount from electricity bills. The penalty proposed was Rs 50 hourly for each consumer for the first two hours of a power cut and Rs 100 for every subsequent hour. It had asked DERC to track outages and defaults daily.
ESMS, introduced by a Pune-based body called Prayas Energy Group, has been launched at 60 locations across nine states, including in 20 cities. The Forum of Regulators (FoR), a representative body of ERCs, recently discussed the functioning of ESMS. A FoR official said ESMS would be installed in a few hundred more locations in the coming months.
Prayas' core team member Shantanu Dixit told Business Standard, ''Regulatory commissions in Karnataka and Assam have initiated steps to join the initiative. We hope ESMS will facilitate regulatory commissions and utilities to improve supply quality and, hence, consumer satisfaction.''
