NXT GEN SMART METER: NON-TECHNICAL LOSS
Given the topic, it seems appropriate to start with a safety moment. Working with utilities for many years you gain an appreciation for the overwhelming duty to serve and the focus on safety across the industry. Working with loss recovery teams, the first thing they mention to me regarding non-technical loss is their concern for the safety of the community. Theft of power is dangerous to those doing the hook ups, those illegally receiving service, utility personnel and to the community.
Almost one week to DISTRIBUTECH23. Continuing a series of thoughts on next generation smart meters. Today, looking at the potential changes for the detection of non-technical loss. Looking forward to talking with colleagues at the conference soon....
WHAT IS NON-TECHNICAL LOSS
The power grid has technical losses resulting from the transmission and conversion of power. A common form of non-technical loss at the point of service is power theft. Electricity thieves utilize a variety of techniques to either hook up illegal power or modify the measurement of power.
EXISTING AMI CAN DETECT POWER THEFT
A point of pride for many of my utility friends is the use of advanced metering for helping identify and prevent theft of service. For many years, AMI systems have included mechanisms that can detect local actions at the meter. The ability to detect tilt, an unexpected outage and unexpected load at the point of service are features that have been part of the traditional AMI systems. As meter events are pushed to the head end systems, these events along with the meter energy measurements, over time can be analyzed and provide indications of non-technical losses at data warehouses that are part of the AMI head end system.
NEED FOR AUTOMATION AND VISIBILITY
While some utilities have had good success utilizing their AMI data to help with loss recovery, not all are able to get the full value from their current deployments. A common theme with utilities regarding their systems is an increasing need for automation and visibility. With next generation meters there is the potential to do the analysis at the edge and provide real time alerts for non-technical loss.
The next generation meters have a detailed view of the consumption of power and changes in the measurement of the consumption of power. This coupled with the traditional tamper detection mechanisms gives the ability to detect meter tampering or changes to meter measurement circuitry in the field. With the meters teaming together to analyze and correlate events in the field, a fully automated field analysis and non-technical loss identification application can be deployed.
领英推荐
This is a good example of the potential of applications for the next generation smart meters. The AMI system providers are creating ecosystems with diverse capabilities and development kits to support developers to build the applications. While there are applications being developed and deployed for meter tampering, there are many more potential applications in this area. There will be application providers at Distributech and it will be exciting to see what applications they are working on and deploying today.
OPEN QUESTION
What next generation smart metering applications have you seen in the field?
Tomorrow: Next Generation Smart Metering and WiFI
FOR INTEREST:
Detroit Edison gave a powerful presentation regarding non-technical loss at UCA OpenSG some years ago, this is one of a series of videos they shared ( local news piece ) regarding a variety of theft issues.