Our Innovations

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.

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.

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.

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%.