STMicroelectronics has partnered with Wasion Group, a China-based supplier of energy-metering technology, to introduce NFC-enabled power meters to the residents of ChongQing, China.

The new meters, which integrate NFC technology from ST, enables users to pay their electricity bills with a tap of an NFC phone. According to ST, the data is transmitted from the meter to the phone over a standard contactless RF interface, then encrypted and sent over the 2G/3G mobile network to the banking back-end to complete the payment.

The system-in-package contains an NFC contactless interface (ST21NFCA) and a Secure Element (ST33F1M). The Secure Element comes embedded with an operating system from Gemalto, which is designed to provide a secure environment for the application to run and store metering data.

The NFC-enabled power meter prototype has been available since January 2012 and volume production will begin in June 2012, according to ST.