A Smart card based Prepaid Electricity System

The purpose of this project is to design and develop an intelligent energy metering system that can efficiently control the amount of electricity consumed by the user.Electricity users can buy specific amount of energy to use it only when they needed.This is achieved by interfacing energy meter with smart card technology.

Over the past few years, smart cards have achieved a growing acceptance as a powerful tool for security, identification, and authorization. Financial card issuers are moving to replace magnetic stripe cards with chip cards to reduce counterfeiting and fraud. The increasing computational power placed on the chip along with advances in cryptography has made the smart card a very powerful tool for identification. 

This project features a smart card secure solution for a novel prepaid electricity system. The proposed system uses a controller in addition to a power meter, providing efficient control of the amount of electricity consumed by the user. Since the last decades of the past century, scientists and researchers have been worried about energy conservation. People spend much more power than what they actually need and that results in a huge loss of energy. 

Moreover, the continuous increase in the universal energy prices has resulted in a huge economical loss. Thus we are proposing a prepaid electricity smart card based system so people can buy specific amount of energy to use it only when they need. The purpose of this project is to reduce the power bill defaulter using smart card technology.