Summary

• Energy accounting forms the primary for a detailed and complete evaluation of the power supply system. It is a system of recording, analyzing and reporting energy consumption and cost on a regular basis. This helps in an accurate accounting of the energy produced, transferred, as well as the energy lost and revenue realized at every level of power generation, distribution and transmission.

• Energy accounting is required to estimate the AT&C losses and determine their sources in the utilities so which measures could be taken to reduce them. The adoption of proper energy accounting would also facilitate increased revenue realization for the energy supplied to the consumers by the identification of areas and causes of high energy losses and cutting down on its own expenses on account of the operational inefficiencies. It also helps the utility in bringing accountability and efficiency in its working. This would enable improving the financial health of the utility and would contribute substantially towards whole development of the power sector.

• The energy accounting procedure includes the preparation of energy balance that is a set of relationships accounting for all the energy which is generates and consumed. It also includes the preparation of accounts of energy flow to several segments, energy consumption through several categories of consumers, energy losses involves both technical and commercial losses at several stages, and energy required for meeting the technical needs of the system out of total available quantum over a specified time period. This has to be completed at all levels of responsibility. The exercise includes establishment of an energy measurement system and segregation of technical and commercial losses associated to the different responsibility areas.

• The steps which could be taken at the feeder level for energy accounting are to measure the energy received at the feeder, list the customers billed, record the revenue from bills, compute the difference in billing and collections and acquire the difference in input energy cost at the feeder level and the total revenue realized from collections. Special cases which might arise in the sub-transmission and distribution systems involve the case of feeders crossing boundaries and feeding the loads (either in part or in full) of other areas also. Such inter-area exchanges should be prevented at the 11 kV level through network reconfiguration and administrative/jurisdictional adjustments.

• Practices such as well described procedures for reading of the energy meters (on 11 kV feeders) not having data logging facilities, and consumer meters, easy procedures to correct for non-concurrent reading of consumer meters and billing cycles and accounting for un-metered consumption, till like time as 100 percent consumer metering is within place would enhance the reliability and correctness of energy accounting:

• Management of a utility requires addressing the problems of lack of meters, inadequate workforce, insufficient numbers of computers, and time parallax in data collection, corruption and inefficiency of the workforce in sequence to implement energy accounting. Advanced IT technologies are helpful in the preparation of electrical network database and consolidation and documentation of consumer details that are necessary first steps in energy accounting.