INDIA READY FOR THE NEXT WAVE OF SMART GAS METERING : LoRa

#News(General) [ via IoTForIndiaGroup ]

Pipeline Natural Gas or PNG as its commonly known has been around for over a decade now across India in domestic, commercial and industrial sectors. As of reports available by the City Gas Distribution (CGD)companies in April 2018 there were 4.5Mln Domestic gas connections , 30K commercial and some 9K industrial connections across India. PNGRB (the regulator) announced the winners of the 9th round of bidding on August 10th 2018 and as per these results

78 new GA’s(geographical areas) have been issued to 19 entities.
About 15.3Mln new domestic PNG (Piped Natural Gas) connections would be commissioned by 30th September 2026
The total demand from CGD sector is expected to grow from 15.3 MMSCMD in 2012-13 to 85.6 MMSCMD in 2029-30 at a CAGR of 10.7%. *.mmscmd : million metric standard cubic meter per day
As of today a CGD company uses manual feet on street to gather meter readings from every meter. A question that haunts every CGD deploying these new connections : With all the inaccuracies and consumer privacy intrusion complaints & lock out doors ; how would they manage to scale up from 4.5Mln to 20Mln ?
Well, this is where Automation can help …Smart Metering While the industry struggles to grapple with some old legacy systems in Upstream and its downstream business, smart gas meters are the future and offer an entire range of solution for domestic, commercial & industrial metering. All that a CGD needs is to have retrofits of MIU (meter interface units) on their existing meters and have smart meters installed going forward.

For sure a fixed LPWAN (low power wide area network) like LoRa (Long Range, Low Power) is what takes the pain away from a CGD and provides hourly / daily / weekly …. readings to build the consumer profile. Such a solution also provides gas based analytics and offers some futuristic tools like variable tariff plans, gas balancing between upstream and downstream business to eliminate LUAG(loss of unaccounted gas).

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