Parameter identification of unknown radial grids for theft detection

Abstract

This paper proposes an algorithm to detect the stealing of electricity by illegal connections in smart grids with unknown or uncertain cable lengths. Many new applications in the rising smart grid context will require information of the grid topology. We show that with measurement data of smart meters, the grid can be identified, as well as the phase of connection. One of the applications requiring grid information is the detection of electricity theft by double feeding. Electricity theft is a problem faced by all power utilities. Financial impacts are a reduced income for the system operator and the necessity to charge more to other customers. Stealing of electricity by double feeding can not be detected by the smart meter or by analysing the load profiles. Therefore it is suggested in this paper to use measurements of smart meters to identify the grid parameters and detect irregularities of specific customers.

Detection of Non-technical Losses in Smart Distribution Networks: A Review

“…When Monte Carlo noise was added to real measurements, in order to produce data for baseline construction, it was concluded that the active power injection residues of the generators are impacted the most by the attack. Weckx et al in [14] propose a linearized load flow algorithmic approach using SM data for electricity theft detection via illegal connections, when line lengths are unknown or uncertain. At the same time, basic information of the topology can be extracted and the phase of consumers can be identified in an automatic way.…”

State estimation for energy theft detection in microgrids

“…al [11] propose an algorithm that first finds out a fraudulent user's transformer, and then tries to identify the particular fraudulent user by analyzing the energy consumption variance of all the users connected to the transformer. Weckx et al [12] can find energy thieves by modeling a distribution network as a linear equation, only if all the voltage measurements and some initial power measurements are authentic, i.e., not tampered by the energy thieves. Unfortunately, we find that all these techniques have low detection rates.…”

Voltage Sensitivity Analysis of a Laboratory Distribution Grid With Incomplete Data

“…If the measurements are sensitive to outliers, the 1-norm can be applied in (3) instead of the 2-norm. When prior knowledge of the grid is available, this can be included by adding constraints to the LS problem (3) and making it a convex optimization problem [40] which can be efficiently solved [41].…”