Smart Energy Meter with Flexible Billing and Payment Options

Abstract

The manual postpaid energy metering system, which requires manual reading of meters is still employed in power systems worldwide even though it is known to be slow, labour intensive, costly, error-prone and does not allow consumers to accurately estimate their monthly bills. The prepaid metering system, which attempts to address some of the shortcomings of the postpaid metering system is rigid and not suitable for pay-after-use situations. Smart meters enable automatic collection and processing of consumption data, power system monitoring, automated billing, and a two-way information flow, allowing interaction between the supplier and consumer. These functionalities eliminate most of the challenges of traditional, manually read meters and are capable of incorporating both prepaid and postpaid-style billing systems with various usage choices. This paper proposes a multi-featured, all-in-one smart metering system that allows the supplier to monitor and control usage and provides the consumer with the option to choose between prepaid and postpaid metering modes as needed. More importantly, we propose an incentivised mechanism - based on consumer payment record - for granting usage privileges such as postpaid billing option.  This is meant to encourage prompt payment of bills, leading to better revenue mobilisation for the supplier and consequently improved service delivery. In addition, real-time consumption, billing and payment information is hosted on a Google Firebase framework and is made available to the consumer through a mobile application. The supplier also accesses the information through a web application. The system is implemented and demonstrated using low-cost, off-the-shelf hardware and freely available open-source software.