With the widely using of the digital energy meter in the construction of intelligent substation, the demand for accurate and reliable high-performance reference digital energy meter on the field of digital energy meter on-site Calibration becomes urgent. The paper analyzes that the complex load conditions and on-site calibration require the reference digital energy meter with the performance of high accuracy, fast calibration and high reliability. Based on DSP system, the reference digital energy meter achieves high-performance energy measurement and reference pulse output by the technology of high-precision pulse frequency divider and the sum of dot product algorithm after interpolation resampled. Accuracy of the reference digital energy meter in this paper can meet the error limit requirements under the operating conditions with harmonic and input noise. And the testing results show that the energy measurement error of the device does not exceed 0.02%. The reference digital energy meter developed in this paper can be applied to the field of digital energy meter measurement and operation status evaluation under the real load.