PANAJI
After a two-year long delay, the Goa government is all set to replace the existing electronic power meters with smart meters, as the Letter of Award being issued to DigiSmart Networks Pvt Ltd (lead consortium member) and CWD Ltd (consortium member).
In the first phase, the project will replace the commercial and three-phase meters, starting from July.
The CWD Limited informed that it has received a Letter of Award for a major smart metering project from the Goa government. The order, placed under the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) initiative, involves the deployment and maintenance of 9 lakh smart prepaid meters over a period of 10 years.
The company said that the implementation will be based on the Design-Build-Finance-Own-Operate-Transfer (DBFOOT) model.
CWD will provide the wireless IoT modules while DigiSmart will handle ground-level deployment. The project will be executed within a period of 27 months.
The project is to be implemented in OPEX mode for 93 months, excluding an execution period, and the company is responsible for the supply, installation, testing, and commissioning of the smart metering infrastructure along with operation and maintenance for this duration. The total cost of the estimate put to tender was over Rs 396 crore.
The Union Power Ministry had recently pulled up the State government over its consistent delay in implementing the Smart Metering Project, which was sanctioned to the coastal State way back in 2021 with a total budgetary provision of Rs 467 crore.
In March, the Cabinet approved the appointment of DigiSmart Networks Pvt Ltd as the service provider. During the recent interaction, the Ministry had directed setting up of prepaid smart meters in all government establishments on priority and to ensure that the project is completed in the current financial year itself,.
According to the Electricity Department, the smart meters function on a real-time basis and record and store all electrical parameters such as consumption of energy, voltage and current levels, etc. The data will be used by the department for billing, to monitor power quality, load scheduling, demand management and fault analysis.
