A joint venture company is being established to provide the infrastructure to enable India’s distribution companies to accelerate their smart meter rollout. Press reports indicate that the joint venture under the ministry of power will provide a ‘common backend infrastructure facility’ with a standardised and scalable architecture that the discoms can ‘plug and play’. Such an architecture should simplify the rollout of smart meters by avoiding duplication and enabling the meter data management to be scaled as required.

Power and renewable energy minister launched the pan-India real-time market (RTM) in electricity, placing India amongst a few electricity markets in the world having it. RTM is an organized market platform to enable the buyers and sellers pan-India to meet their energy requirement closer to real time of operation.  RTM would bring required flexibility in the market to provide real-time balance while ensuring optimal utilisation of the available surplus capacity in the system and would also help manage demand pattern diversity in the country with an organized market.