TN wants to delink smart meters and prepaid system: Union Min Manohar Lal

CHENNAI: Union Minister for Power and Urban Affairs Manohar Lal on Saturday said that the Tamil Nadu government has demanded the Centre not to link the smart meters with prepaid systems as the consumers are not ready to switch.

"As far as the State (TN) is concerned, the demand is that the smart meter policy should not be attached to the prepaid system as the consumers are not ready to make a switch yet. I have suggested that first, you start with a postpaid meter system (for installing smart meters). And then the State could come out with a policy to give concessions to prepaid consumers," he told reporters here after chairing a review meeting on Power Sector and Urban Affairs.

State Power Minister V Senthilbalaji, Energy Department principal secretary Beela Venkatesan and Tangedco CMD K Nandhakumar were present at the meeting. State Power Minister V Senthilbalaji, Energy Department principal secretary Beela Venkatesan and Tangedco CMD K Nandhakumar were present at the meeting. The State government has raised the concern following apprehensions voiced by various political parties that the introduction of smart meters linked with the prepaid system would deny access to subsidised energy supply to domestic consumers.

Tangedco had invited proposals for appointing advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) service providers for the smart prepaid system last August. The plan is to procure devices for a total of 3 crore LT, LT CT and HT consumers in 38 districts. Procuring 4.72 lakh distribution transformer metering devices, 16,974 feeder metering devices and 1,300 boundary metering equipment were also part of the proposals. The smart meter project would be implemented under the DBFOOT (design, build, finance, own, operate, and transfer) model. For more than a year, the smart tender was under the process.

On whether the Centre would allocate more share in power from the Central grid to the State, the Union minister said that Tamil Nadu is already in surplus and hence no need to increase the state share.Union minister