NILM-based approach for energy efficiency assessment of household appliances

Fernando D Garcia,Ivando S Diniz,Fernando P Marafão,Wesley A Souza

doi:10.1186/s42162-020-00131-7

Abstract

This paper presents a novel Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) approach focusing on the Energy Efficiency (EE) assessment of residential appliances. This approach (NILMEE) is able to identify the individual consumption of several household devices, providing proper information for evaluating energy efficiency and pointing out the operational issues or labelling mismatches of appliances, while recommending better practices for energy usage in specific consumer installations. The proposed approach was developed and evaluated by embedding the NILM engine on an electronic power meter, which performs a microscopic analysis on measured voltages and currents and provides the load disaggregation using the Conservative Power Theory for the feature extraction, K-Nearest Neighbours for the appliance classification, and the Power Signature Blob for the energy disaggregation. The disaggregation algorithm performance evaluation is carried out using NILMTK. Results show that NILM transcends the regular energy usage calculation, serving as a tool that enables the diagnosis of household appliances using the energy efficiency indexes provided by labels and standards.

Highlights

Worldwide, energy efficiency policies can bring significant advantages to energy consumers and suppliers, leading to social, environmental, and economic benefits
Experimental results Following the experimental procedure based on Non-intrusive load monitoring toolkit (NILMTK), this section describes the procedure for estimating the EE indexes for two loads of major interest: refrigerators and microwaves
This paper presented a novel Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM)-based approach focusing on the assessment of EE in household appliances

Summary

Introduction

Energy efficiency policies can bring significant advantages to energy consumers and suppliers, leading to social, environmental, and economic benefits. Energy Efficiency (EE) may be an important resource to increase energy supply, as the first response to bigger demands and economic development (WEC 2013; IEA 2016). The growing concern about improving EE has led to the creation of many new technologies, such as those related to energy management to control peak energy demand, better use of home appliances and the development of increasingly more efficient home appliances. These may be effective actions to optimise modern smart grid operations, supporting both consumers and electric utilities toward the energy efficiency perspective. Considering that residential consumers may represent over 30% of the energy consumption in some countries, household appliances may (2020) 3:10 interfere with the overall energy efficiency. Special attention has been paid to heating and cooling devices, leading to energy-consuming loads in residential installations (Pino-Mejías et al 2017)

Methods

Results

Conclusion