Our Satish Saini, HEXstream utilities industry specialist, recently returned from India Smart Utility Week. Here are his takeaways:

—AMI /smart metering are hot topics in India, where more than 500,000 smart meters are currently in use. They have much room for growth, of course, with plans to replace 250,000,000 conventional meters with smart meters across India, which is expected to improve billing efficiency by 75-100% while increasing revenues for utility companies.

—India’s power-distribution system upgrades are managed under its Revamped Distribution Sector Scheme with the objective to reduce aggregate technical & commercial losses to pan-India levels and enhance efficiency in power systems. In addition to consumer smart meters, this organization's goal is to install and manage 54,00,000 smart DT meters and 2,00,000 smart feeder meters, which will trigger huge data and analytics applications and opportunities.

—In addition to metering at various levels, Indian utilities are looking to automate numerous substations and feeders through various ADMS/DMS/SCADA applications.

In summary, all these smart metering initiatives—as well as distribution-automation programs—involve huge amounts of data flowing from utilities’ widely scattered distribution systems and field devices, which create vast opportunities in data management. Now more than ever, we need advanced data analytics applied to these initiatives in order to achieve our objectives.