Design and simulation of a smart energy metering system

Abstract

Power theft has been one of the main problems facing the power industry in Nigeria which had led to huge economic and infrastructural loss to the government and utility companies. Hence the need to proffer solution to this challenge, this research identified the various method of stealing energy which is meter by passing, connecting directly to the supply cable just before it gets to the meter terminal, resetting of meter reading, and deliberate non-payment of electricity bills, vandalism and unfaithful act of the utility employees. The causes and effect of energy theft where also identified to be customer taking electricity as part of social service from the government and also the inability of the utility companies to meter their customers. In finding solution to this problem, this thesis adopted the simulation of anti-tamper sensor (accelerometers, light, tilt, magnetic) using Proteus to create a virtual sensor model that can mimic the behavior of the physical sensors, SMS algorithm was programmed in such that it assumes the micro-controller (ADUINO) and a GSM module from the Proteus library was used, the connection was done using the appropriate serial communication pins. The result obtained shown that smart metering was successfully designed and simulation model accurately replicated the behavior of the energy meter, including measurements of voltage, current, and power consumption. The tampering energy meter seal using highly sensitive sensors to mitigate against energy theft by provide an additional layer of security against meter tampering with incorporated of sensor output information that can sent via by GSM Module to the cloud, which help to mitigate against meter tampering. The complete system software implementation and validation was done using Proteus and Arduino.