Monday, October 4, 2010

RFID May Reduce Electricity Theft

The electricity theft is a huge issue all over the world. The electricity companies try to combat it. The RFID technology could help them avoid the cheating. Mikoh Corporation is working with the government agencies of the US to secure residential electricity meters. The meter application involves RFID tag with encrypted data. The Mikoh realized that the meter would be useful for the US utility market where are billions of dollars per year in lost revenue due to the theft. Mikoh approached the Invensys with this claim. Their solid meter prototype has an automatic meter reading (ATM) reader.

The ATM allows the utilities to get more information from the meter from a central station or a truck.
Mikoh is developing its miniature, low-cost, 13.56 MHz reader that will plug into a circuit board in the meter and communicate with the AMR module. Seals involved with the passive RFID tags will be placed on the meter. According to the above mentioned facts the utility will be able to read data from the seals at regular intervals to detect when a meter has been tampered with.

source: http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/articleview/56/1/38/

No comments:

Post a Comment