In an interview with TimesTech, Rohit Ramanand, GVP of Engineering India at New Relic, speaks about the challenges facing India’s smart metering projects and the critical role of observability in reducing IT outages and downtime in the energy and utility sector.
Read the full interview here:
TimesTech: What challenges are India’s smart metering projects facing, and how are these affecting the initiative?
Rohit: India’s ambitious smart metering program is leading the country in the right direction. According to India’s Ministry of Power, we have one of the highest transmission and distribution losses in the world at 27%, with this even reaching 50% in some states. The impact of such high losses can be far reaching, with financial impacts, resource strains and a damaging environmental impact just some of the downsides. The smart metering program aims to reduce these losses and provide grid connectivity across the county, but it is facing a number of challenges.
The functional effectiveness of smart metering depends on many working parts. Firstly, a smart meter’s telemetry must always be synchronised to the grid so it can reliably deliver information 24/7. Secondly, utility providers must have enough visibility into the meters being installed to ensure they aren’t being tampered with. Thirdly, energy audits and monitoring must be conducted. Finally, there needs to be a reduction in transmission and distribution losses. India plans to install 250 million smart metres and ensure there’s no connectivity loss, which is a huge challenge — but it is one that India can overcome, given the right technologies are put in place to monitor smart metering projects.
TimesTech: Why do energy and utility companies experience more IT outages compared to other sectors?
Rohit: According to the State of Observability for Energy and Utilities report, organisations in these industries experienced outages at a higher rate than all other industries, with 40% having high-business-impact outages at least once a week. The median annual downtime for energy and utility organisations was 37 hours, which is 61% higher than the overall average of 23 hours across other industries.
One reason for this is that climate and weather-related events have increased in recent years, adding an additional layer of complexity and frequency to how utility providers are able to maintain uptime. An example of this was in 2022, when several states lost power during record breaking heat waves. These outages impacted millions of people and highlighted the need for backup power and sufficient cooling systems.
Additionally, many energy and utility companies operate large, complex infrastructures based on legacy systems. When integrating these with modern technologies through digital transformation initiatives, the long-term benefits are significant. However, this process can be challenging and time-consuming, posing a short-term risk of outages during transition, as well as increased risk to potential cyberattacks.
With outages being a top concern for customers, investors, and regulators, utility providers can meet the challenge head on by training staff, and adopting technologies and operational procedures that mitigate the risks.
TimesTech: What factors contribute to the high costs of downtime in energy and utility organisations?
Rohit: The energy and utilities industries provide critical infrastructure that is needed globally for the smooth and efficient distribution of power. Uptime is directly proportional to production. The more an asset is up and running, the more energy resources it can produce. The flip side of this is that the more frequent an outage and its associated downtime, the greater need there is to deploy additional emergency response teams and resources to resolve incidents. Downtime halts production, which can lead to substantial revenue losses through incurring additional wages, transportation and equipment, as well as legal and insurance costs due to consumers taking legal action against energy companies. Additionally, it may be necessary to compensate customers with free units or reduced charges due to service disruption. Frequent or prolonged downtime can sometimes indicate equipment failure or system issues, which poses safety risks. Such risks can increase the costs associated with equipment repair and drive up the risk of accidents and associated liabilities. Additionally, the time taken to resolve an issue can greatly impact the cost of downtime, with more than half of report respondents saying that critical business app outages cost them $500,000 per hour. Such high outage costs add up significantly over time, potentially totalling millions of dollars.
TimesTech: How does observability help energy and utility companies maintain uptime and reduce IT outages?
Rohit: As pillars of critical infrastructure, energy and utilities providers rely on real-time insights into systems and services. Because these businesses can be targets for cyberattacks, infrastructure monitoring and security are crucial. Observability helps to provide a single pane of glass view for energy and utility companies to monitor their entire infrastructure, understand what went wrong, where it went wrong, and how to fix it in minutes instead of hours. It can reduce downtime significantly by improving mean time to detect; ensuring issues are resolved before they spiral into bigger problems.
TimesTech: Can you share examples of how observability solutions have saved energy and utility providers millions by improving reliability?
Rohit: One of the biggest challenges energy providers faces is grid stability, where parameters like line temperatures, frequency changes, and voltage levels fluctuate regularly. Observability offers insights on the health of the infrastructure; supporting companies to make better decisions on stability, preventing overloads, and avoiding cascading grid failures that can lead to major outages.
Observability helps companies view and manage energy consumption patterns and optimise resource allocation. It matches demand and supply, reduces energy waste and improves overall efficiency. This ensures better peak load management and stable energy delivery, reducing unnecessary resource consumption. Observability solutions are great at collecting, analysing and visualising large volumes of data from different systems, helping companies make data-driven decisions on optimising operations, improving load forecast accuracy, and responding more effectively to demand. This drastically improves efficiency and reduces operational overhead and costs.
TimesTech: How does New Relic’s data-driven approach benefit energy and utility providers in improving planning, change failure rates, release frequency, and issue resolution?
Rohit: New Relic’s data-driven approach enables energy and utility companies to continuously monitor equipment and infrastructure, allowing for more predictable maintenance. It helps organisations make better decisions on scheduling repairs and replacements, which is determined by actual usage and the condition of the equipment rather than fixed schedules. New Relic solutions enable early detection of anomalies or inefficiencies in system health, power grid failure, and issues with distribution networks; creating a proactive approach to solving the problem of downtime. It reduces the blast radius of an incident and ultimately improves the bottom line.
