Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Ali Adabi, Member, IEEE, Pavlo Manovi, Member, IEEE, and Patrick Mantey, Fellow, IEEE
J. Baskin School of Engineering
University of California Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz, USA
aadabi,manovi,mantey@soe.ucsc.edu
Abstract—Effective home energy management requires data must be managed or communicated, but which also cripples
on the current power consumption of devices in the home. NILM [1] [2].
Individually monitoring every appliance is costly and incon-
venient. Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) promises to In a growing number of utilities, consumers are faced with
provide individual electrical load information from aggregate ToU pricing, in an attempt by utilities and the PUCs to imple-
power measurements. Application of NILM in residential settings ment load shifting to reduce peak load and to respond to the
has been constrained by the data provided by utility billing smart variability of energy supply with a growing use of intermittent
meters. Current utility billing smart meters do not deliver data renewable sources. Utilities employ a variety of rate structures,
that supports quantifying the harmonic content in the 60 Hz from fixed rates with tiers, to scheduled variable pricing with
waveforms. Research in NILM has a critical need for a low-
tiers, or more dynamic pricing such as critical peak pricing
cost sensor system to collect energy data with fast sampling and
significant precision to demonstrate actual data requirements. or market pricing. If a consumer had real-time information of
Implementation of cost-effective NILM in a residential consumer electrical energy use at their home, with identification of use by
context requires real-time processing of this data to identify indi- individual appliances, and with this information immediately
vidual loads. This paper describes a system providing a powerful available on a smart phone or other personal display, then the
and flexible platform, supporting user configuration of sampling consumer could be guided in management of their appliances
rates and amplitude resolution up to 65 kHz and up to 24 bits in response to changes in energy pricing, or to a potential
respectively. The internal processor is also capable of running energy shortage. For example, if via NILM, the consumer is
NILM algorithms in real time on the sampled measurements. made aware that their clothes dryer is running and that the
Using this prototype, real time load identification can be provided current price of energy is very high, they could defer that use
to the consumer for control, visualization, feedback, and demand
until the price drops.
response implications.
Consumers have some flexibility in their timing of energy
use; some are essential at the moment, others can be run
I. I NTRODUCTION
later when energy costs are less. We divide loads into three
Consumers need a cost-effective Energy Management Sys- categories 1 in terms of flexibility of usage as shown in
tem (EMS) for their homes, to fill a variety of needs. Manage- Figure 1:
ment of loads supports conservation efforts, and can provide
warning of unusual or unwanted energy use. When the local • Deferrable loads [4]: Appliances which can be
utility implements Time-of-Use (ToU) pricing, an EMS is rescheduled to run at different times such as dish-
essential in aiding the effective response of the consumer. washer, laundry washer, dryer, electric heating, electric
water heater, electric vehicle charging, electric oven,
Central to EMS is real-time information on what devices coffee maker, microwave, etc.
at any moment are on and what energy they are consuming.
Nonintrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) makes possible the use • Marginally deferrable loads: Appliances which defer-
of one (or a few) measurements of energy at an electrical panel, ring their schedule can cause significant inconvenience
and from disaggregation of those measurements, consumption to the consumers such as microwave, electric range,
by individual devices is determined. and electric HVAC on a hot/cold day.
The energy use data provided by current utility smart • Non-deferrable loads (Critical Loads): Appliances
meters, as deployed widely in the US, provide data that is that their schedule cannot be altered or deferred such
sparsely sampled in time (i.e. every 15 min). This data is as refrigerator, modem, router, medical equipment
not adequate for quantifying harmonics of the 60 Hz, and such as CPAP etc.
this information on the higher harmonics can greatly improve
Use of NILM in a home with an EMS, and with suitably
performance of NILM [1], [2]. Consumer concerns regarding
equipped appliances, makes possible automatic shedding of
privacy argue against utilities capturing data that can be used to
nonessential loads during times of peak prices. In the suite of
identify individual loads on the customer side of the meter [3].
Consumer deployment of electrical energy monitoring devices 1 Some of these categorizations depend on consumer preferences, for ex-
to implement NILM also suffer from their low sampling ample, some consumers might consider coffee maker or microwave as non-
frequency data interfaces, which limits the amount of data that deferrable loads.
Fig. 4. Circuit monitor is part of the proposed NILM system which can
implement realtime disaggregation on board
every minute. By comparison, the system described here can the local microprocessor include k-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN)
sample much faster and also provide finer resolution amplitude algorithms. If local recognition is not successful, the data are
data to better support disaggregation. sent to the server for further processing, and can also be
sent to the consumer’s smart phone for manual classification.
Shenavar et al. [10] has also designed a NILM embedded Other values reported to the server include the RMS value of
system. However, no details on its DAQ were provided in that current and voltage along with the power factor. These can
paper, except that they concluded that sampling 100 times per be computed as frequently as once each cycle of the 60 Hz.
cycle (5 kHz or 6 kHz) would be adequate. The processing capabilities of the hardware layer are such that
Shaw et. al. [11] discussed design and implementation signals at a range of sampling rates can be created and be
of hardware and software tools for nonintrusive electrical processed simultaneously. The server layer supports further
load monitoring. They proposed techniques for transient event analysis for unrecognized devices, and provides information
detection and steady state monitoring of the power consump- to the outside world (the application layer) through the in-
tion of varying loads (e.g., variable speed drives). However, terface layer, whose Application Programming Interface (API)
the system described was expensive, using the technologies supports outside applications (i.e. the EMS) which can include
available in 1998. Our system, by comparison, is much more automation, visualization, and demand response.
cost-effective with the benefit of current technology.
Hardware Server Interface Application
NILM software systems and data processing pipelines Layer
y Layer Layer Layer
are currently under development for disaggregation. Barta et
al. [12] have developed a toolkit called NILMTK for pro-
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