Patna, June 8: The Bihar Electricity Regulatory Commission (Berc), which recently announced a hike of 19 per cent in power tariff with effect from May 1, 2011, has asked the Bihar State Electricity Board (BSEB) to check its malignant trend of rising transmission and distribution (T&D) loss to overcome the perennial problem of energy scarcity.

The commission has asked the board to bring down its T&D loss to 29 per cent from the current 39 per cent. For this, the board has to adopt the energy accounting of every transformer besides bringing every consumer under the metering and billing system.

The commission has issued a directive time and again for metering of all categories of consumers, metering of 33 and 11 KV feeders and distribution transformer (from which general consumers get power supply) and their monitoring for conducting energy accounting and energy audit, the tariff order said. It further noted that nearly 40 per cent of 33 and 11 KV feeders are un-metered.

“BSEB is directed to install metres in every 33 KV and 11 KV feeder and distribution transformers as soon as possible so that energy accounting could be done to ensure bills could be generated for the consumption of electricity from a particular transformer,” BERC chairman U.N. Panjiar and members S.M. Sahay and R.N. Sharma said in their tariff order for 2011-12.

“This process has to start immediately without waiting for all the required infrastructure, including metering of all consumers and feeders, to be in place,” the order said.

Distribution transformer (DT)-meter based energy accounting would show the actual meter reading of the transformer from which the consumers have got connection both legally and illegally.

Explaining how it would check the loss occurred to the board due to theft, an official said that if for example the DT meter of a particular area showed the reading as 100 units and the accumulated reading of all consumers connected from this particular transformer showed 60 units, it meant 40 units were being illegally utilized for which bills were not generated leading to revenue loss.

The board admitted before the commission that so far transformer-wise energy accounting had not been done. Of the existing 51,996 distribution transformers, only 16,035 had been metered.

Board spokesman H.R. Pandey said: “We are taking steps to reduce transmission and distribution loss. For this, we have outsourced the job of 100 per cent meter reading, computerised billing, bill distribution besides keeping a constant tab on the premises of disconnected consumers and running consumers.”

But Pandey remained non-committal about the time-frame for reducing the T&D loss.