Smart electricity distribution in residential areas: Internet of Things (IoT) based advanced metering infrastructure and cloud analytics

Energy is the foundation block for any socio economic development. There is a significant disparity in the growth rate of population fuelling a demand for energy and the installed capacity base of energy generation in India. Many countries worldwide, have adopted smart cities and smart metering program to cope up with the pressure of growing population and limited infrastructure with mixed results. The Indian government smart cities program to develop over hundred cities will require efficient power management to ensure uninterrupted power supply to all house hold and commercial establishments. This would require commissioning of smart meters generating petabytes (PB) of data on current readings, pilferage, damage, over current drawn, power factor and prepaid billing among other parameters of interest. This huge flow of data would require a supporting Information Technology infrastructure hosted on anytime-anywhere and highly scalable cloud platform providing storage and immense computing power. The beneficiary of such infrastructure would be the citizens, distribution companies and its analytics would help the policy makers. This paper aims at identifying the current energy developments in India, identify the use of ICT technology including Cloud and Internet of Things being adopted worldwide and finally the authors suggest key technology and power components for a Residential Smart Energy Distribution and lists down innovative analytics which can be derived from these components. Finally it lists down some futuristic suggestions by the authors to improve energy conservation, reduce operational costs and empower the customer with usage analytics.