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Monday, November 1, 2010

HameshaON–Solving Power Theft Problem in India

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Did you know that India loses about INR 40,000 Crores (35%) annually, South Africa loses about 4.4 billion RND annually – all because of power theft?  50% of Indian utilities operate at loss levels between 45-60%!

For instance, Orissa loses about INR 1250 crores per year due to distribution losses. This is representative of a loss of above 40%. There are divisions which operate at an efficiency of 26-30% ie loss of 70-74%.

HameshaON, a Bangalore based startup has come up with an innovative product that guarantees zero power loss due to theft and commercial reasons. The product enables peak reduction without inconveniencing consumers, it eliminates the need for power cuts and automates the entire power distribution, billing and payment processes.

The product/system Hamesha ON consists of different components and they work together to deliver the desired result.

  • Power manager with configurable no. of connections up to 16 connections from a single device.
  • Overhead theft detector that sits on the overhead wire with Phase Tripping Deviceimage
  • Network control application through Windows/Web interface.
  • Optional In Home Display for consumers.

Why HameshaON? Why don’t present solutions like metering by state electricity boards etc. address the issues that HameshaON is trying to address?

Metering done by the electricity boards are single point devices with a specific function of metering – the problem the utilities face is not in getting the correct meter reading, they already have the correct meter reading data.

Problem lies outside of metering – where the distribution network as a whole presents phase balancing problems, overload problems, loss related problems – none of which have anything to do with any metering system or any SCADA solution they have implemented. Hence the problem stays on.
Most established metering companies are more than 25 years old – some even more than 100, like Itron – and the problem of losses has been there ever since. The fact that the problem has not been solved despite big companies being present for long clearly shows that the way of looking at the problem was always wrong i.e. metering – hence the solution will always be wrong.

HameshaON’s solution provides following benefits to utility companies:

  • Guaranteed elimination of power theft. Detect & Prevent theft instantly. 100% Overhead theft detection/prevention & Meter Bypassing. No waiting for future data analysis to identify theft that happened in the past.
  • Instantly Detect trouble points that reduce Power Quality or can cause outages.
  • Totally granular Demand Side Management without expensive Home Area Network devices that need individual switching of appliances for demand control.
  • Variable Power Delivery (like 5%, 10%, 25%, 75% etc) instead of ON/OFF.
  • Always-ON Power Guarantee to consumers.
  • Low Total Cost – approx INR 1500 per consumer
  • Single solution for AMR, Billing, Demand Side Management, On Field Employee performance, Feeder Load Balancing, Power Loss Control.
  • Entire H/W and S/W from a single provider & no need for maintaining separate servers and buying expensive software systems

The company has been granted a provisional patent and is on its way to become the 1st large scale implementer of Smart Grid in the country-with guaranteed business results (has signed up a state government and has a guaranteed revenue of few crores). Company’s business model revolves around Input based franchisee, BOOT model, Devices sales (plus AMC) and technology license.

[HameshaON is one of the startups demoed at UnPluGGd]


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