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Fault identification and power theft indicator with load sharing transformer using GSM technology
ABSTRACT:-
This paper presents a new methodology to identify energy theft and tampered meters as well as meters that are not working properly. It is based on a central observer meter that is responsible for metering the overall energy of a group of consumers under investigation. Deterministic and statistic approaches are used to determine which consumers have problems in their premises. Also, pattern recognition is used to discover energy theft using bypass.
In India, one of the most challenging problems that distribution utilities are facing is energy losses. Losses of distribution utilities are defined as the net result of the difference between the generated and or purchased energy and the energy effectively billed. They can be arranged in two types: technical and commercial losses. Technical losses are related to non idealities of electric equipment: transformers, transmission lines and other equipment have, for instance, ohmic losses and even the meters are not lossless. In order to reduce technical losses, several actions can be carried out by the utility: replacing old equipment by more efficient equipment, designing and building more efficient distribution networks, etc. Commercial losses are the net difference between the energy effectively supplied by the distribution utility and the effectively billed energy of the consumers. Theft of energy and meters that don’t work properly are one of the major causes of commercial losses. Also, problems in the billing system may cause commercial losses to the distribution utility. Checking the billing procedures of the utility can be the first step to reduce commercial losses. To do that, the consumer database must be always updated, reflecting any change verified in the field with the smallest time delay.
This database is important not only for auditing the billing. It is crucial for discovering energy frauds, as it maintains key information such as the class of the consumers (residential, commercial, industrial, etc.), the address, technical aspects of the metering installation (for example, number of phases), the distribution transformer to which the consumer is connected, etc. Another way to reduce the utility’s commercial losses is to enhance the observability of the consumers. A possible action can be regularly visiting the consumers’ metering installations to check them in order to find out any problem.
This should be done by specialized and well-trained teams. However, these visits are expensive if carried out for the whole set of consumers of the utility. Because of that, utilities usually adopt a statistical approach to select the consumers to be inspected and, consequently, they don’t find out the existing problems of all installations. One possible alternative, reported in the literature, is substituting the conventional electromechanical meters for electronic ones, with anti-tampering characteristics. Signal, S. SI discusses revenue protection features brought by electronic measurement.