Smart Meters for Domestic Consumers: Innovative Methods for Identifying Appliances using NIALM

Abstract

A country drives by their people and the electricity energy, the availability of the electricity power reflects the strength of that country. All most everything depends on the electricity energy, So it is become very important that we use the available energy very efficiently, and here the energy management come in the picture and Non Intrusive appliance Load monitoring (NIALM) is the part of energy management, in which the energy consumption by the particular load is monitored without any intrusion of wire/circuit. In literature, NIALM has been discussed as a monitoring process for conservation of energy using single point sensing (SPS) for extraction of aggregate signal of the appliances’ features, ignoring the second function of demand response (DR) assuming that it would be manual or sensor-based. This assumption is not implementable in developing countries like India, because of requirement of extra cost of sensors, and privacy concerns. Surprisingly, despite decades of research on NIALM, none of the suggested procedures has resulted in commercial application. This paper highlights the causes behind non- commercialization, and proposes a viable and easy solution worthy of commercial exploitation both for monitoring and DR management for outage reduction in respect of Indian domestic consumers. Using a approach of multi point sensing (MPS), combined with Independent Component Analysis (ICA), experiments has been done in laboratory environment and CPWD specification has been followed.