Evaluation of Electronic Energy Meter Measurement Error for Circuits with Switching Power Converters

A recent study performed by the authors in [1] has shown that some electronic energy meters are susceptible to electromagnetic interference resulting in significant errors in the energy measurement. The authors have proposed that this interference is likely introduced by electronic switching loads on the metered circuit. Further, they observed that the interfering signal was introduced into the meter through the power lines being monitored by the meter where the choice of transducer, software algorithms and filtering technology all have a significant impact on error magnitude and direction. This paper presents follow-on work to the aforementioned study presenting the experimental setup, analysis approach and initial results from tests conducted at the National Institute of Standards and Technology on energy meters complying with the ANSI C12.20 [2] standard which is the American National Standard for performance and accuracy of electricity meters.