Background
Contributing 9% directly to GDP, electricity, telecom, gas, and water utilities deliver essential services that play a critical role in economic and social development. Powered by telecom and electric networks, the reach of both governance and businesses has expanded in an unprecedented manner in last few decades. Designed on these networks, digital transformations are ushering governance and businesses into a new era and enabling more than 50% of the country’s GDP. During the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns, the telecom sector alone enabled 30-35% of GDP.
Electric and telecom networks have become the backbone of economic activity, while water and gas continue to be the mainstay for fulfilling basic industrial and human needs. Bridging the gap between source and supply, utility networks traversing across the country currently distribute – 3,664 MU of electricity per day through 13.4 million CKm (including above and below 66KV) networks to 597,000 villages; supply drinking water to 58% urban and 43% rural households; supply piped cooking gas to seven million consumers through 20,000 km network; and connect 1.19 billion subscribers through 2.8 million km copper and optic fiber network. Technology driven opportunities including smartphones and connected devices are triggering demand for utility services and consumers are increasingly becoming the focal point of the utility value chain.
Challenges
Notwithstanding the increasing consumer demand, changing lifestyles, and expectations, Indian utilities are faced with the huge challenge of bridging existing gaps while at the same time provisioning the ever-growing demand in a sustainable manner.
Estimated to be a $1 trillion digital economy, India’s telecom sector is looking at deploying five million kilometers of optic fiber, adding 410 million users besides the existing 900 million active internet users by 2025. However, this sector continues to face financial challenges while staring at aging network infrastructure that needs to accommodate increasing demand of data and services.
Despite being world’s largest electricity producer, heavy dependence on fossil fuels, poor infrastructure, inefficient operations, and high transmission losses, are major hurdles electric utilities are faced with. Added to that, poor financial health with mounting losses is slowing down the utilities’ switch to cleaner energy options.
Water utilities are grappling with increasing water demand due to urbanization, pitched against crumbling water infrastructure, 40% losses and poor revenue recognition. While more than 50% rural households are yet to receive piped water, rural water supplies are challenged with lack of efficient distribution networks. This is in the backdrop of the water stress country is experiencing.
With an urgent need to migrate to cleaner fuel, the Indian government plans to increase piped gas distribution to lower the current primary energy mix from 6.2% to 15% by 2030 with 33,000 km of additional gas pipelines. This however is fraught with challenges ranging from land acquisition, right of way, topographic suitability, etc., which pose a risk to the timely completion of these projects.
Physically exposed, these networks are highly vulnerable, and any disruption can have a cascading effect on economic activity. With reliability and resilience taking center stage, there is a pressing need to embrace advanced technologies including Geographic Information System (GIS), Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, etc., to manage network infrastructure and consumer expectations in real-time and also to address the operational challenges, while at the same time rapidly plan, design, build and operate additional networks to meet the increasing demand. With their strategic importance and contribution to economy, Geo-Enabled Smart Utility Management is the only way forward.
You can read the cover article in this series here
Geospatial technology and its applications
With the consumer at the core, there is an immediate need to contextualize network operations for improving situational awareness for actionable intelligence and informed decisions. As Smart Utility Management Systems get deployed, we will be staring at a web of direct real-time contextualized devices and systems, powered by electric grids and connected through communication networks. We will also be tasked with translating petabytes of location intelligent data into insights for operational support and decision making. By geo-enabling the networks, utilities can capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present, data from disparate sources across its networks on a common platform. GIS technologies not only offer powerful visualization capabilities, but also offer benefits of enhanced situational awareness, actionable intelligence, and spatial analytics for smarter decisions.
Facilitating planning, design, monitoring, and maintenance of network, GIS technologies are invaluable for strategic and operational decision support in management of land information, distribution, outages, mobile workforce, revenue, compliance, network integrity, surveillance and infrastructure protection, and emergency response.
You can read the first article in the series here
Geospatial Value Impact
Utilities around the world have vastly improved the management of their complex operations, customer service, and network monitoring using GIS. Private utilities in India too have demonstrated significant operational improvements by adopting GIS-based network management practices. Better network monitoring, improved decision making, reducing distribution losses (up to 40%), improved efficiency and mobile workforce management (up to 30%), and reduced network downtime are some of the major benefits being for the utilities.
This, clubbed with the economic value offered by geospatial technologies in supporting economic and social activities, makes a significant impact on the overall economy. With large and complex networks, public utilities in India have not tapped the potential of geospatial technologies to its fullest yet. A conservative estimate of the Geospatial Value Impact (GVI) on the utilities sector is as under:
Though hardly visible, utilities essentially enable and keep the economy running. In today’s digital age, any disruption to utility services can bring economic and social development to standstill. With their large spread over multiple geographies, situational awareness clubbed with actionable intelligence is vital to keep them up and running without interruptions and GIS technologies offer unmatched capabilities. As the pace of digital transformation picks up, only geo-enabled networks can ensure reliability and strengthen the network resilience to bounce back in the event of disruptions.
i. Through improved planning, and operational efficiencies, better resource utilization, reduced losses, enhanced stakeholder collaboration and cost avoidance (considering a conservative 10% overall improvement)
ii. Assuming that ₹500 ($6.7) per person per month can be passed on as consumer benefit and reaches 50% of the country’s population
iii. Cost savings on account of environmental degradation, restoration and prevention of disasters (based on the assumption that a switch to cleaner energy will reduce pollution, aid in controlling environmental degradation at least by 2% per annum
