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Role of GIS in preventing power pilferage

Dr. Nagesh Rajopadhyay, Manish Arora and P. Madhusudhan
Info Tech Enterprise Limited, Hyderabad

"The total power generation in the country was around one lakh MW of which billing was done only for 55,000 MW and the rest 45,000 MW was going as pilferage and power theft. Out of 45,000 MW, the annual power theft was around 30,000 MW causing a financial loss of Rs 20,000 crore to the nation's exchequer every year - A report"

The Power sector plays a very important and vital role in the economic development of a country. The growth of development of Industries, Agriculture, Infrastructure, is dependent on the state of power sector. In India approx. 35-40% of the losses are contributed by Transmission and Distribution losses. These losses are much higher if we compare any other developed country.

Several State Electricity Boards (SEB), to identify the areas incurring high losses, have performed detailed Energy Audit. As the nature of the loss is both technical and commercial, it becomes more difficult to differentiate the loss in between these two factors. This can only be possible by making a detailed study of the system. As pilferage takes place mostly at the LT level hence it becomes crucial to carry out the study upto consumer level. The losses in the physical system like line losses, transformation losses forms the technical losses and removing the technical losses from total losses will give us the commercial losses in the system. Commercial losses come from a variety of sources, all of which have in common that energy was delivered but not paid for. The potential sources of commercial loss or the theft of utility service could be a direct connection from a feeder or wire bypassing the meter, tampering with meters or meter reader fraud. The SmallWorld Software from GE provides such facilities.

This paper emphasizes the role of GIS for identifying the network areas, which could be facing the problem of power pilferage.



Methodology
GE-Smallworld software (version 3.1) was used at InfoTech to work out a prototype solution for the power pilferage over GIS. PTI engines were interfaced with this GIS for Network analysis and optimization. Data model was created in Smallworld for the land base as well as for the network. The steps involved in estimating power pilferage for a given substation is as follows;

• Interface billing system to GE-Smallworld by making Smallworld application software to read external RDBMS of Billing system.(See Figure -1)
• Get the billing related information filled into customer data
• Identify the total power given out (P-Total) by the substation and the total power billed to the customer (P-billed).
• Estimate the losses in the network (P-lost) using GIS and Network analysis package over the identified land base and the network data.
• Work out Power Pilferage (P-Pilferage) or commercial loss for the given substation as (P-Total)-(P-billed)-(P-lost). Plot the results on GIS.
• Work out the similar pilferage analysis transformer wise provided a meter is installed at transformer and the reading is available for the analysis. Plot the results on GIS.

In order to carry out the analysis for the pilferage it becomes very important to accommodate network related data fields in the customer table itself which can have the additional fields like: -Substation id, Subscriber no., Last bill date, Start date for present bill, End date for present bill, Circle code, Bill no., No. of units consumed and the Amount billed.

Out of these fields, except substation id, remaining fields are assumed to be available in the customer-billing database. A link has to be maintained between the external billing database and Smallworld database. Only the most recent billing data can be maintained in the Smallworld GIS customer table, so that the duplication of more data can be avoided. Following figure illustrates the interface

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