The first quarter of 2022 will witness the inauguration of the smart meter factory in Rusayl at the cost of RO 4 million. The factory’s production capacity would be 150,000 meters annually, as the factory is projected to replace 1.2 million meters during the next five years.
The importance of this project lies in providing accurate data on consumption, cost reduction against the use of traditional meters, monitoring and reducing leaks, besides determining their locations and ability to control users’ consumption.
The National Energy Center has successfully implemented two pilot projects: One installing more than 300,000 smart water meters in 2019 in the Governorate of Muscat and another in Musandam with more than 10,000 smart electricity meters in 2016.
The Nama Group, through its affiliated distribution companies, introduced smart measurement technologies in the Sultanate of Oman in 2017. It implemented the Automated Meter Reading (AMR) project within the requirements of the APSR in the country.
Smart meters (AMR) will be implemented with subscribers of high electricity consumption who consume more than 150 megawatt-hours of electricity annually.
Nama explained that the AMR project is expected to create a higher level of interdependence, participation, and sustainability to enhance the quality and speed of processing meter reading data.
Moreover, it will improve the billing process, mitigate losses, reduce related costs and reduce debtor days. In addition, the implementation of the cost-reflective tariff system legislated by the Authority will allow and promote better electricity consumption behaviours, especially during peak periods.
Last April, Hilal bin Muhammad al Ghaithi, Director General of Subscribers Affairs at the Public Services Regulatory Authority, told Oman News Agency that the project to switch to smart meters for electricity subscribers in the Sultanate of Oman aims to install more than 1.2 million smart meters in all governorates of the Sultanate, in five years.
He stressed that the project was in alignment with the objectives of the Oman Vision 2040, which focused on keeping pace with global developments and employing technology in providing electricity-related services with greater effectiveness and efficiency. “It will support the development of sustainable smart cities that are characterised by the availability of advanced basic services.”
The factory comes as a pioneering national project towards digital transformation to replace electrical mechanical meters with advanced smart meters, keeping abreast of recent developments, to facilitate the process of meter reading and ease of communication with subscribers throughout the Sultanate of Oman and to providing a radical solution to the accuracy of meter reading and avoiding discretionary readings.
The smart meters allow subscribers to monitor consumption periodically and thus control its pattern, provide opportunities to the owners of small and medium enterprises to carry out activities and businesses related to replacing and installing smart meters, reducing commercial losses in the network in the long term, alerting licensed companies in the event of a defect with the subscriber as well as reducing the service period in the event of a power cut.
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