Advancing utility solutions with smart metering & smart grid technologies

Murali Krishna Gannamani- MD & CEO, Fluentgrid Limited. In an Interview with EPR Magazine.

Discussing the significance of AMI technologies for utility and DISCOMs, Murali Krishna Gannamani, MD & CEO Fluentgrid Limited briefly explained us the benefits of the same in enhancing operational efficiency and performance. 

It’s inspiring how you have built Fluentgrid as the Make In India smart grid technology products and solutions company. Can you please take us through your entrepreneurial journey?

Fluentgrid was established in 1998 as a niche software product and solutions company catering to the power sector. Our aim was to address power utility pain points, especially on the revenue and customer side, through the application of technology. Towards that end, we partnered with a number of power utilities in India & abroad and successfully delivered results by helping them decrease revenue losses, enhance consumer engagement, and improve operational efficiency through seamless integration. We take pride in deploying our billing and customer care product, Fluentgrid CIS, on the cloud for about 23 million consumers of Uttar Pradesh DISCOMs, which is the largest such deployment in the world. This project has set many benchmarks besides introducing a novel OPEX business model for utility CIS projects in India.

Along the way, we moved up the utility solutions value chain with some pioneering smart metering and smart grid solutions. The Fluentgrid AMI product suite made its mark in the ongoing 250 million smart prepaid metres programme of the Indian government. With our proven and technologically superior UHES and MDMS products and our commitment to walking the path with our customers, we are geared up to help the maximum number of utilities reap the benefits of this initiative.

We leveraged our IoT and analytics capabilities to put together an innovative Integrated Operations Center platform called Actilligence. This platform enabled us to deploy command and control centre solutions for several smart cities like Visakhapatnam, Kochi, Lucknow, and Bengaluru. We are now extending the reach of this platform into power utilities with our Smart Meter Operations Center (SMOC) and Utility Operations Center (UOC) offerings.

Our software products are well known in the global utility eco-system. International market research firms like Gartner and Guidehouse write about our products in their research reports and market guides. We are a CMMI Level 5 company with over 1000 employees and offices in India, Singapore, and the USA. We are a signatory to the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) and are committed to working towards a sustainable environment and future.

What’s your view on the ongoing universal smart prepaid metering programme in India? What problems would it solve? How are you contributing to this program?

The Indian government’s initiative to roll out 250 million smart prepaid metres across the country would definitely help the DISCOMs curtail AT&C losses and improve their cash flows. DISCOMs have realised that the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) system would not only address the upcoming challenges posed by rooftop solar and EV penetration, but also become the backbone for future smart grid initiatives and help them with finer demand side management, outage and power quality monitoring, accurate load forecasting, and so on.

Hence, it becomes even more important to choose the right technology solution and vendors for the ongoing smart metering projects. Besides identifying a proven technology solution that is locally tested at scale, utilities are better off working with technology providers who are well versed in the intricacies of the power domain within the local context, besides being reachable.

Having worked and integrated with a wide array of smart meters, metering protocols, communication technologies, and billing systems in the past, we have the most robust, readily deployable products and a large pool of experts adept at successfully rolling out these projects in a short span of time. These SIs are not just looking for smart metres and software products, but the necessary expertise to execute and sustain these projects successfully and the commitment to stay by their side through thick and thin.

We are the pioneers in the Indian smart metering revolution with many firsts, including IPv6 based smart metering, protocol and metre agnostic unified head-end system, metre data acquisition over NB-IoT communication network, and a robust home-grown MDMS, all of which were proven in the field across several metering projects, including NDMC, India’s first municipal corporation to go live with 100 percent smart metering. NDMC achieved a 16 percent improvement in monthly billing, which is huge.

We have implemented our metre data management system (MDMS) at about 14 utilities, for a cumulative total of 7.68 million meters. Fluentgrid MDMS is the first Asianheadquartered company’s utility product to be featured in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and subsequently in the Gartner Market Guide for Utility Meter Data Management Systems since 2014.

The Fluentgrid Actilligence-based Smart Meter Operations Center (SMOC) solution has got a lot of potential for monitoring smart metre rollout projects and subsequent operations monitoring.

What after that? What role will it play in ushering in the next era of energy transition? Is Fluentgrid geared up for those future scenarios?

We have worked on several smart grid projects in the recent past, both as system integrators and OEMs. In the process, we have also put together a comprehensive suite of smart grid products that leverage AMI data. Once the ongoing smart metering projects are rolled out and stabilised, we are ready to help the utilities unlock value from their meter data, thereby improving their RoI.

With the One Nation, One Grid, One Frequency policy, we have made good strides on the transmission side. And I am hoping that the three major initiatives around smart metering, renewables, and EVs are all going to be realised in parallel, and that they will in turn create a plethora of challenges and opportunities leading to what is called the Internet of Energy (IoE). There are exciting times ahead for the Indian power sector and our R&D team is working on several innovative solutions around those themes, leveraging IoT, AI, drones and Blockchain technologies.

Fluentgrid is also a leading player in smart city solutions. Do you see any synergies between power utility solutions there?

We have implemented City Command and Control Center solutions for Visakhapatnam, Lucknow, Kochi, and Bengaluru smart cities. Both the power utilities and smart cities can benefit from each other on several fronts. They could look at issuing an integrated bill for all utility services like power, water, and sewage. They could also consider incorporating power consumer self-service into smart city web, mobile, and call centre apps.They could look at correlating each other’s data to identify anomalies in service connections, wilful defaulters, wrong categorisation of consumers, and so on. They could ride on a single communication network or head-end system for Smart Meter data acquisition. They can think of combining outreach programmes to educate citizens on energy and water efficiency. If they can come together, the possibilities are indeed unlimited.

How are you placed beyond India? What is your strategy to take your solutions to the global markets?

We have made our mark in emerging economies, including South and Central Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe with our CIS and MDMS products. 

Our global standard products, pioneering initiatives, and benchmark implementations are getting noticed across the globe, and we have been invited to partner with several reputed SIs from across the globe. We are on the verge of finalising our GTM strategy with several of our partners to take our products and solutions to overseas markets, which are opening up for replacements and the next level of innovative solutions.