I Squared Capital, Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (Omers), OTPP, Canadian pension fund Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ), Brookfield, Macquarie, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), the World Bank’s private investment arm International Finance Corp. (IFC) and multilateral development lender Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) are among the potential investors evaluating firms in this sector, four industry experts said.

In April, VCCircle reported that Omers is considering creating an investment platform by joining hands with EDF India Pvt. Ltd, the Indian unit of French state-run power utility Électricité de France SA (EDF).

In February, I Squared Capital said it took a controlling stake in Jaipur-based smart Metering firm Gram Power, a wholly-owned unit of Singapore’s Polaris Smart Metering Pte Ltd.

The strong interest is driven by a growing number of firms in the sector and, crucially, governmental support in implementing planned projects, the people cited above said.

Early this year, the government said it is implementing the smart metering project nationally, under the new Revamped Distribution Sector Scheme (RDSS), with a planned installation of 250 million meters, and $30 billion in investments by 2025.

“A strong impetus to this scheme is the target and of the required investment, at least $10-15 billion equity will be required to execute the projects…Our estimate is that over half of this requirement is already allotted, or bids are in process. So, implementation is going on,” said an investment banker working on 2-3 deals.

There are at least 5-6 large companies such as Adani Group, GMR, L&T, CDPQ-backed Apraava Energy, IntelliSmart Infrastructure Pvt. Ltd (a joint venture of National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF) and Energy Efficiency Services Ltd (EESL) and Genus Power Infrastructures Ltd, besides other smaller firms actively pursuing the smart meter manufacturing space.

Last year, EESL said that it had installed over 1.05 million prepared smart meters in Bihar. It also claimed to have installed around 1.15 million smart meters in Uttar Pradesh, over 124,000 in Rajasthan, over 530,000 in Haryana, about 64,000 in Delhi, and over 74,000 smart meters in the Andaman islands.

Expected to bring a paradigm shift in India’s power distribution, smart metering is a new-age technology that allows utilities to digitize and fully automate their metering to enable real-time monitoring of energy consumption. It results in billing and collection efficiencies by curbing losses, arresting thefts and leakages, and empowering consumers, to make power distribution and consumption more sustainable.

“Spurt in smart meter adoption is primarily driven by the need to better manage power grid, detect and respond to outages besides solving collection issues being currently faced by utility firms. This will improve real time monitoring, analysis of consumer usage patterns, and reduce losses faced due to tampering and pilferage leading to improvement in overall cost effectiveness of the power grid,” said Sandeep Upadhyay, managing director and chief executive, infrastructure advisory at Centrum Capital.

In FY22, the Aggregate Transmission & Commercial (AT&C) losses of power distribution utilities stood at 17%, compared to 21-22% in the last two years, according to power ministry data issued in December 2022. Smart metering is expected to reduce this to 12-15% by 2024-25, as per government estimates.

Updated: 27 Jun 2023, 12:11 AM IST