Prospects of Smart Metering System in Bangladesh: Cost Benefit Analysis

Abstract

One of the most significant parts of smart grid is Smart Metering System. They felicitate the information exchange between the service providers and the consumers, resulting in efficient management in the electricity supply. Many Western countries like Great Britain (GB) and Canada have conducted Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) before starting installation of Smart Meter. The aim of this study is to compare the benefits from the Smart metering system over traditional (electro-mechanical and prepaid) meters, in accordance with Cost Benefit Analysis. So the main focus is to put emphasis on the Cost Benefit Analysis. The most important fact to analyse before the installation of Smart Meters is to find out the advantages of such technology as well as the cost behind the setup of such meter. Such as the degradation of CO <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf> emission, the installation and maintenance expenses, financial savings from the Time-of-Use (ToU) etc. The establishment cost of installing Smart Meter may be high but in general, the roll-out offers a 1.36 benefit-to-cost ratio (BCR), which reflects the costs and benefits of lifetime. In this study, Chittagong Municipality Area was chosen to find out how can the prepaid meters be replaced with the Smart Meters within an approximate minimal expense. From the very beginning of installing Smart Metering system, the required costs that have been calculated for installing Smart Metering system include operational cost, maintenance cost, meter cost, In-home display cost, Data Communications Company (DCC) cost etc. The estimated total cost of this project is set to be approximately ${\$}$ 300.9M.