Real-time Monitoring of Energy Meters Using Cloud Storage

The trends and technologies in power systems are rapidly changing. As part of conversion to Smart Grid, there is an increased demand for an efficient and reliable Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) system especially in domestic consumers. Smart energy meters are widely employed in developed countries where there are Smart grids. The immediate transition to smart meters generates huge financial investments for developing countries like India. In order to minimize this initial investment as well as the E-wastes, it is possible to upgrade the functionality of the existing digital meter by incorporating an additional circuitry. This paper presents the design of an energy meter suitable for our traditional power grids, and its associated web interface based on cloud storage, for automating billing and managing the collected data. Here the proposed design converts the conventional digital electronic energy meters into AMRs, capable of communicating with the utility and the consumers. A Long Range (LoRa) WiFi-based wireless communication module is integrated with an electronic energy meter through a gateway and Raspberry pi module. An optocoupler is used to fetch the meter readings from the pulses of LEDs of the energy meter. A LoRa receiver at the other end, with a cloud database, acts as the billing point. The cloud storage used is Firebase. A responsive, user-friendly graphical user interface has developed for monitoring the consumption. With proper authentication, users can access the developed web page from anywhere in the world. The total energy consumption and the due bill of the customers can be obtained from this webpage. The consumers can also set their consumption limits and thereby reduce their overall energy consumption for energy management. The proposed system neglects the regular digital metering system and allows remote access to the electronic meter.