Report of Indian Institute of Public Administration ... - Ministry of Power

CONSUMER METERING
State Reports (Vol.-III)
Study on `Impact of Restructuring of SEBs’
The financial health of the power sector is critically dependent on an accurate assessment
of revenue and its subsequent realisation. Failure to cover even the cost of supply has
led to mounting commercial losses for UPPCL. The recovery of cost of supply through
tariff has declined from about 71 to 63 per cent in the last five years ending 2003-04.
Thus every additional unit sold by the UPPCL adds to its losses. In such a scenario, the
need for proper metering and energy audit needs no emphasis. But the sheer physical
magnitude of the task, coupled with organisational and financial constraints has resulted
in the progress of metering being very slow. Although, meters have been installed on all
11 kV and above voltage level feeders, at the retail consumers level out of a total of 8.2
million consumer connections, only 4.6 million, that is, about 56 per cent are metered.
The position regarding metering as a proportion of total connections (in per cent ) is
shown in the table below:
Consumer Category-wise Metering (%)
Category 2001-02 2002-03 2003-04 2004-05
Agriculture 2 2 2 3
Domestic 49 50 53 54
Industrial Large HT 100 100 100 100
Industrial Small LT 100 100 100 100
Commercial LT 91 93 93 93
Metering in the agricultural sector is almost negligible and in the domestic sector, it is
about 50 per cent. In view of this, it is obvious that the figures of consumption and
consequently loss figures as indicated by the utilities may not be realistic.
Considering that capacity additions in generation are likely to come only towards the end
of the Eleventh Plan, the State sector needs to undertake urgent steps to relieve the
demand deficit through improving energy accounting and reducing T&D losses through
consumer indexing and feeder level monitoring. The State has a particularly high
component of unmetered energy being supplied to rural domestic and agricultural
sectors, heavily contributing to its commercial losses due to lack of accountability,
theft/pilferage and poor operating efficiencies of agricultural pumpsets.
UPERC has consistently disputed the figures of energy consumption to the unmetered
categories furnished by UPPCL and has been approving the consumption in these
categories on normative basis, based on Tyagi Committee recommendations. This restatement
of consumption in the unmetered categories has also led to considerable
diversity in the system loss estimation between the Utility and UPERC.
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