Intelligent GSM Based Prepaid Energy Meter in a Cashless Economy

With the current trend of Information Technology in our present time, the lot in our daily life is developing accordingly, and energy meters are no exception to this phenomenon. An intelligent GSM based prepaid energy meter is developed to be able to accurately calculate the amount of consumed energy by a certain building, display the remaining energy available from a pre-purchase of electricity, by which is done by the means of recharge through SMS service. The energy meter provide the utility company with regular status of the meter on a predefined interval, and also display a real time on the users account update, which contributes to the retrieval of the balance of the meter, as well as keeping log of the consumed energy and remaining electricity of each user by the means of SMS. It also provide utility company the ability to send updated consumption rates according to the Time of Day Tariff (TDF) to the meter on pre-defined intervals. This paper presents a prepaid energy meter to facilitate energy consumption measurement and to know consumers maximum demand as well to detect any bypass of voltage or current in the building. The prepaid energy meter concept is shown by Proteus 8 software simulation. The major components are AVR microcontroller, Voltage and Current transformer, LCD, Relay and a load. Electricity has become one of the basic requirements for people and widely used for domestic, industrial and agricultural purposes. The system was designed and implemented on a trivial load level with the hardware requirements of different analog and digital components and interfaces between them, such as latches, MAX 232, a microcontroller and so on. The software for this system was implemented with the use of embedded system code written onto the microcontroller. And the designed and implementation is an efficient way to collect billings for electricity consumptions, which further facilitate the recharge process of meters currently being used to the generalization and the acceptability in other to revolutionaries the entire metering system used in the 21 st century. Intelligent GSM, Prepaid energy meter, and Microcontroller.1