Noncontact Power Meter

Energy metering is increasingly important in today’s power grid. With real-time power meters, utilities can efficiently incorporate renewables and consumers can tailor their demand accordingly. Several high-profile attempts at delivering realtime energy analytics to users, including Google Power Meter and Microsoft Hohm, have essentially failed because of a lack of sufficient richness and access to data at adequate bandwidth for reasonable cost. High performance meters can provide adequate data, but require custom installation at prohibitive expense, e.g., requiring an electrician for installation. This paper presents hardware and signal processing algorithms that enable high bandwidth measurements of voltage, current, harmonics, and power on an aggregate electrical service (such as a residential powerline) for nonintrusive analysis with hardware that requires no special skill or safety considerations for installation.