Design and Implementation of a Cloud-Based Load Monitoring Scheme for Electricity Theft Detection on a Conventional Grid

Abstract

Electricity theft is one of the problems - encountered by the utilities - that leads to losses of revenue. Manual monitoring of the consumers’ activities which shows the energy data consumed on the conventional grid has largely contributed to electricity theft on the grid. Significantly, the energy meter deployed to monitor the load cannot store and transmit energy data in real-time. This has made electricity theft on the grid unnoticed. This paper presents the development of a monitoring scheme for an electronic meter on the conventional grid with the capability to monitor, store and transmit consumers’ energy data to the cloud. It consists of two units: the indoor and the outdoor unit. Energy data is transferred wirelessly between the units via the Wi-Fi modules. The outdoor unit compares the data and transfers the outcome to the ThinkSpeak cloud server. The transferred energy data can be accessed in real-time from the cloud or downloaded in comma-separated values format for further use. In order to verify the functionality of the proposed scheme, two scenarios of electricity theft - partial bypassing and full bypassing - are carried out. The obtained results show that the scheme can detect the theft and log the data to the cloud successfully.