For reliable electricity to reach thousands of villages, it needs to be easier to install, easier to monitor, and easier to pay for. We have developed and deployed technologies to streamline our operations, and instituted sound business practices to enhance our viability and benefit our employees. By promoting adoption of these innovations to other mini-grid developers, we are able to broaden and strengthen the ecosystem of energy service provision.
A perennial concern of electricity customers, both on- and off-grid, is poor or irregular communication with electricity providers about bill payment and complaint redressal.
Customer app tackles these issues by giving customers easy access to their payment history, outstanding balance, and energy usage history – the same information available to the electricity provider. Both parties can flag errors in the data.
The SmartConnect mobile application provides a portal for registering complaints and service requests, and to track progress on their resolution. Electricity packages can be updated instantly and transparently. Furthermore, it is a useful tool for plant management to send alerts and advertise promotions to groups of customers.
The impact on field agents’ time and customer satisfaction levels has been significant, with the former saving 15-16 hours per week on customer payments and complaints, and with 30-40% of customers reporting high satisfaction with the service received through the app.
“The best thing about the app is that it puts everyone on the same page – customers, field personnel, and management. This reduces disagreements and ambiguity about billing, and the terms and responsibilities of service.” - Narinder Abrol, Manager Operations and Sales, Tara Urja
“The data management system allows me to ascertain, in a few clicks, what is going wrong and right with my mini-grid plants, and which customers or field agents are needing my attention.” - Mukesh Khandelwal, Business Unit Head, Tara Urja, Smart Power India.
Accurate monitoring of the financial and technical health of a mini-grid site requires high-quality, timely data to be available from the ground. The challenge then is to create a robust pipeline for data input – easy for agents to use in the field, yet versatile and powerful enough for management to engage in detailed analytics.
Data Management System was developed for this purpose. Through a secure app, field agents upload and authenticate customer data such as bill payment and energy usage, and plant data such as diesel consumption and solar generation. Reducing the number of steps required to log data significantly reduces opportunities for error.
Through the online platform, managers gain access to aggregated and dis-aggregated customer and plant information across their whole portfolio of sites. This allows them to track the effectiveness of schemes and the performance of field agents, and keep an eye on technical indicators and operational costs.
A key part of electricity service provision is reading customers’ meters and billing customers for the energy they consume. This places considerable demands on field agents’ time, especially in low-income communities where bill payment may be delayed or piecemeal. This time could otherwise be spent on essential maintenance, customer service, or marketing activities.
A key part of electricity service provision is billing customers for the energy they consume. However, reading meters, creating and deliverabling bills and collecting dues, all place considerable demands. Smart Spark Meters tackle this problem by automating meter records and generating electronic bills, which are wirelessly uploaded to servers via the GSM network. Fewer steps in the data pipeline means less opportunity for errors to creep in.
Customers’ packages can be upgraded, promotions applied, or disconnections implemented in seconds by cluster managers or field agents. Furthermore, the meters track electricity demand data at fine time resolution, giving providers a detailed insight into their customers’ consumption patterns and allowing them to regulate and improve service.
Spark Meters are in use at 10 sites across Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The impact has been immediate, with 50% of field agents’ metering time freed up for other activities.
"We used to spend a lot of time on complaints from customers that their meter readings had been incorrectly registered. Now both we and the customers have confidence that bills will be correct." - Vikas Saxena, State Incharge - Uttar Pradesh, Tara Urja
As the mini-grid sector matures, the variety and quality of customised technologies and services continues to grow. The Mini-grid-in-a-Box, developed with our partner AmpereHour, is a prime example of this evolving ecosystem.
Until recently, mini-grid equipment---solar panels, inverters, dataloggers, etc.---had to be appropriated from other power sector applications. This hampered efficient assembly and smooth communication between components, and has necessitated compromises on plant design.
The Mini-grid-in-a-Box pre-integrates the electrical equipment necessary to operate a mini-grid. The system has been especially developed with mini-grids in mind – for instance though optimising battery management, including irradiance sensors as standard, incorporating exhaustive data collection and cloud communication, and executing dedicated analysis routines to monitor performance and flag faults.
The prototype has been commissioned and is undergoing testing at Parsa, Bihar.
"The pre-assembled mini-grid-in-a-box solution is a significant step in the mini-grid technology ecosystem, that reduces installation time & cost, ensures system modularity for future scale, seamless integration of multiple generation sources and enables energy service companies (ESCOs) to better manage daily load curves more efficiently." - Umang Maheshwari, Associate Director Innovation, Smart Power India
In order to deliver high quality, uninterrupted power to customers, mini-grids employ solar panels for day-time load, solar-charged batteries for night-time load, and diesel generators for when the batteries get depleted.
A Power Management System carefully moderates the balance of these three power sources to ensure maximum utilisation of solar energy, and to minimise costly and polluting diesel usage. Automated monitoring frees up plant operators’ time and energy to focus on other critical maintenance.
Arranging for seamless communication between different plant components is a key implementation challenge here. For instance, accurate calculation of a battery’s energy level is critical for an inverter to decide whether it can sustain further discharge.
The Power Management System installed at the Bheldi site in Bihar has been operating since October 2018, governing when the plant’s diesel and biogas generators switch on and off. Preliminary data for winter months suggest that fuel costs have come down by INR 1000-2000 per month, and solar generation has increased by 11%.
“Routine technical matters like when to turn on the generator should not be governed by intuition about load and generation patterns when supply and demand can both be accurately measured.” - Dharamraj Singh, State Incharge - Bihar, Tara Urja
A perennial concern of electricity customers, both on- and off-grid, is poor or irregular communication with electricity providers about bill payment and complaint redressal.
Customer app tackles these issues by giving customers easy access to their payment history, outstanding balance, and energy usage history – the same information available to the electricity provider. Both parties can flag errors in the data.
The SmartConnect mobile application provides a portal for registering complaints and service requests, and to track progress on their resolution. Electricity packages can be updated instantly and transparently. Furthermore, it is a useful tool for plant management to send alerts and advertise promotions to groups of customers.
The impact on field agents’ time and customer satisfaction levels has been significant, with the former saving 15-16 hours per week on customer payments and complaints, and with 30-40% of customers reporting high satisfaction with the service received through the app.
“The best thing about the app is that it puts everyone on the same page – customers, field personnel, and management. This reduces disagreements and ambiguity about billing, and the terms and responsibilities of service.” - Narinder Abrol, Manager Operations and Sales, Tara Urja
Accurate monitoring of the financial and technical health of a mini-grid site requires high-quality, timely data to be available from the ground. The challenge then is to create a robust pipeline for data input – easy for agents to use in the field, yet versatile and powerful enough for management to engage in detailed analytics.
Data Management System was developed for this purpose. Through a secure app, field agents upload and authenticate customer data such as bill payment and energy usage, and plant data such as diesel consumption and solar generation. Reducing the number of steps required to log data significantly reduces opportunities for error.
Through the online platform, managers gain access to aggregated and dis-aggregated customer and plant information across their whole portfolio of sites. This allows them to track the effectiveness of schemes and the performance of field agents, and keep an eye on technical indicators and operational costs.
“The data management system allows me to ascertain, in a few clicks, what is going wrong and right with my mini-grid plants, and which customers or field agents are needing my attention.” - Mukesh Khandelwal, Business Unit Head, Tara Urja, Smart Power India.
A key part of electricity service provision is reading customers’ meters and billing customers for the energy they consume. This places considerable demands on field agents’ time, especially in low-income communities where bill payment may be delayed or piecemeal. This time could otherwise be spent on essential maintenance, customer service, or marketing activities.
A key part of electricity service provision is billing customers for the energy they consume. However, reading meters, creating and deliverabling bills and collecting dues, all place considerable demands. Smart Spark Meters tackle this problem by automating meter records and generating electronic bills, which are wirelessly uploaded to servers via the GSM network. Fewer steps in the data pipeline means less opportunity for errors to creep in.
Customers’ packages can be upgraded, promotions applied, or disconnections implemented in seconds by cluster managers or field agents. Furthermore, the meters track electricity demand data at fine time resolution, giving providers a detailed insight into their customers’ consumption patterns and allowing them to regulate and improve service.
Spark Meters are in use at 10 sites across Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The impact has been immediate, with 50% of field agents’ metering time freed up for other activities.
"We used to spend a lot of time on complaints from customers that their meter readings had been incorrectly registered. Now both we and the customers have confidence that bills will be correct." - Vikas Saxena, State Incharge - Uttar Pradesh, Tara Urja
As the mini-grid sector matures, the variety and quality of customised technologies and services continues to grow. The Mini-grid-in-a-Box, developed with our partner AmpereHour, is a prime example of this evolving ecosystem.
Until recently, mini-grid equipment---solar panels, inverters, dataloggers, etc.---had to be appropriated from other power sector applications. This hampered efficient assembly and smooth communication between components, and has necessitated compromises on plant design.
The Mini-grid-in-a-Box pre-integrates the electrical equipment necessary to operate a mini-grid. The system has been especially developed with mini-grids in mind – for instance though optimising battery management, including irradiance sensors as standard, incorporating exhaustive data collection and cloud communication, and executing dedicated analysis routines to monitor performance and flag faults.
The prototype has been commissioned and is undergoing testing at Parsa, Bihar.
"The pre-assembled mini-grid-in-a-box solution is a significant step in the mini-grid technology ecosystem, that reduces installation time & cost, ensures system modularity for future scale, seamless integration of multiple generation sources and enables energy service companies (ESCOs) to better manage daily load curves more efficiently." - Umang Maheshwari, Associate Director Innovation, Smart Power India
In order to deliver high quality, uninterrupted power to customers, mini-grids employ solar panels for day-time load, solar-charged batteries for night-time load, and diesel generators for when the batteries get depleted.
A Power Management System carefully moderates the balance of these three power sources to ensure maximum utilisation of solar energy, and to minimise costly and polluting diesel usage. Automated monitoring frees up plant operators’ time and energy to focus on other critical maintenance.
Arranging for seamless communication between different plant components is a key implementation challenge here. For instance, accurate calculation of a battery’s energy level is critical for an inverter to decide whether it can sustain further discharge.
The Power Management System installed at the Bheldi site in Bihar has been operating since October 2018, governing when the plant’s diesel and biogas generators switch on and off. Preliminary data for winter months suggest that fuel costs have come down by INR 1000-2000 per month, and solar generation has increased by 11%.
“Routine technical matters like when to turn on the generator should not be governed by intuition about load and generation patterns when supply and demand can both be accurately measured.” - Dharamraj Singh, State Incharge - Bihar, Tara Urja