Load Measurement and Analysis for Inverse Load Reconstruction

In many applications of electric power systems like cost optimization for cost-aware consumers, load simulation and prediction, load-dependent energy generation in smart grids, and inverse load reconstruction, we need a more or less detailed understanding of the power consumption behavior of different loads. In particular, in the last challenging task of inverse load reconstruction, we want to reconstruct the individual power consumptions of different loads from the total measurements of a single or a few power meters. This would enable a convenient and cost-effective way of collecting individual load data without installing power meters on all loads. This paper makes the first step towards this direction. It performs a feasibility study by measuring and analyzing the load characteristics of different home and office electric devices and tries to answer the question, whether such an inverse load reconstruction is possible. In the companion paper (B. Yang, Z. Zhou, Joint modeling of device load and user intention), we derive models of the load behavior from the load measurements and models of the user intension and study the interactions between the user models and load models.