Investigation of appropriate technology for remote monitoring of electrical power consumption in Tanzania

Power utility companies in developing countries have been experiencing various problems, which have caused low revenue collection. For the Conventional metering, the problems are: power theft, difficulty meter billing procedure, difficulty meter reading for scattered villages. For pre-paid meter systems, the problems are: the missing direct link between customers and the utility companies and corruption of some agencies due to non-centralized vending stations. Power utility companies in developed countries after realizing the shortfalls in the above mentioned metering systems, they introduced electronic remote meters, computerized handheld recording device and so on. However, it has been found that the systems cannot overcome power-tampering issues and were not cost effective. Now the power utility companies in developed countries are changing to Automatic Meter Reader systems, which send, and receive data through telephone line, radio telecommunication network, advanced wireless and powerline networks. The systems are not suitable for the environment of developing countries and are not cost effective. In this research work, a remote power monitoring network using powerlines communication has been investigated. The research demonstrates the method on how such a system will be realized by developing the data link from customers7 meters to primary substations. In addition, it shows how different customers7 meters will communicate through the proposed remote power monitoring powerline network. It has been found out that, using direct sequence spread spectrum with Binary Phase Shift Keying and Bose Chaudhuri Hacknguem coding two hops will be required to provide reliable communication between the distribution transformers and the primary substation. The frequency is 140kHz and data rate of 10kbps. In addition, due to the topology of powerline the transmitted signal to noise ratio of 71.5dB and 50dB and Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Detection and Token bus have been used from customer meter to distribution transformer and distribution transformer to primary substation respectively.