The NOIDA Power Company Ltd. (NPCL) is one of the few distribution companies in the country and is responsible for supply of electricity in the NOIDA region of UP. NOIDA is rapidly emerging as an upcoming industrial suburb of the National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi. The light and fan connections for the domestic consumers (rural and semi-urban) are charged on the basis of a flat rate (subsidized) and are un-metered. Metering if all, is at the transformer level. The independent customers are not metered. Since the connections are un-metered, the actual electricity consumption is not known.

NPCL has approached Winrock International India (WII) to assess the normative electricity consumption of the light and fan connections by undertaking a study over a representative sample of these connections. By doing this, NPCL will:

• be in a better position to optimally undertake its system maintenance, management, planning and expansion
• identify energy saving opportunities in these connections and embark on strategies to conservation electricity
• be able to inform the UP Electricity Regulatory Commission and the UP Government of the actual consumption and actual losses. This in turn will enable the UPERC and the UP government to come up with realistic policies on tariffs

WII has submitted a sampling plan to NPCL, which need to be metered and monitored over a period of time. NPCL has installed the metering devices based on the sampling plan. WII has used a combination of powerful statistical tools known as inferential statistics and stratified random sampling. A methodology has been developed to identify a sample of metered and un-metered that should be metered to arrive at Normative Consumption of electricity.