A smart card based prepaid electricity system 

As Tamil Nadu's power managers struggle desperately to cope with an acute electricity shortage, the Tamil Nadu Electricity Board (TNEB) is faced with another huge problem – its messy financial situation which is threatening its viability.

Reliable sources in the TNEB told The Times of India that its losses, mounting since 2005-06, stand at about Rs 9,000 crore. Officials are now worried that if the government fails to hike the power tariff by next year, the Board would have to dip into capital funds to meet its revenue expenditure. The board is also losing Rs 200 crore every month curbing power consumption by industries. The HT (high tension) users consume 41% of the total production. If a restriction is imposed on them, the TNEB’s income is bound to suffer further. 

Further, for transporting one million tonnes of coal per month to various power generation points, the board paid around Rs 1,700 per tonne to the railways. With the demand for power going up and the TNEB imposing restrictions on industries, cases of power thefts are on the rise, according to TNEB sources. In the last one week, the TNEB vigilance squad detected two cases of power thefts in and around the city.
Solution: Over the past several years, smart cards have achieved a growing acceptance as a powerful tool for security, identification, and authorization. 

Financial card issuers are moving to replace magnetic stripe cards with chip cards to reduce counterfeiting and fraud. The increasing computational power placed on the chip along with advances in cryptography has made the smart card a very powerful tool for identification. The advent of multi-application smart card operating systems for both contact and contact less applications has put smart cards on the edge of information technology. This paper introduces a novel 3-tier smart card secure solution for prepaid electricity. The proposed system uses an IP-based controller in addition to a power meter, providing efficient online control of the amount of electricity consumed by the user. The user can use the card to log in to the service provider company, as well as toping up his smart card for additional power needed.

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