Design and Implementation of Low Cost Digital Energy Meter for Smart Grid Applications

This paper presents a new design of a single-phase digital energy meter with self-calibration technique based on PIC16F84A microcontroller for monitoring the consumed energy of any load with high accuracy and stability. The design has the advantage of self-calibration and the meter can be fully managed from the PC. A graphical user interface (GUI) was designed to manage the functions of the proposed digital meter using the free application Visual Basic 6.0  (VB 6.0), Through PC standard serial port interfacing. The proposed digital meter can be used in the smart metering systems which are present in the first stage of the smart grid project.  In addition, the cost of the proposed digital energy meter is about 20 $, which is lower as compared to the traditional electromechanical meters.