What is AT&C Loss?

Most of the employee, persons and other connected to any power and energy distribution company may come to chanting about the term AT&C. AT&C seems really a big term for such companies and organization who are able to see big picture of loss in terms of energy as well as revenue.

So finally it comes into our mind, what is it exactly? why energy sector's organizations are worried about it?

Let's discuss about it.....

AT&C is abbreviated for Aggregated technical and commercial losses which means it is whole combining these 2 factors named as Technical Losses and Commercial Losses.

Technical Losses are unavoidable losses due to flow of power in transmission and distribution systems which is result of:

• Network Design
• Specifications of the equipments used in the network
• Network Operation Parameters

It is normally in the range of 10%  to 15% normally for Indian networks.

Commercial losses are avoidable up to some extent which arise due to operational loopholes. It is result of:

• Theft & Hooking 
• Metering Issues
• Inefficient Billing
• Inadequate revenue collection
• Low Customer Satisfaction
• Non-remunerative tariff Structure & subsidies

Any power transmission and distribution company doesn't target to reduce the technical losses as earlier discussed that it arises due to network design and specifications. However, They concentrate on to reduce the commercial losses first.

At the end, they come up with the AT&C calculation which shows the actual work progress and their actions to work against these losses. AT&C is normally measured in percentage w.r.t any asset distribution asset such as Feeder and DTR ( Distribution Transformer ) etc.

% AT&C = { 1 - Billing Efficiency x Collection Efficiency }  x  100

where 

Billing Efficiency:  Total Billed Unit (kWH) /  Total Input Energy (kWH)  w.r.t. distribution asset

Collection Efficiency:  Total Collected amount /  Total Billed Amount