Electricity Theft Pinpointing Through Correlation Analysis of Master and Individual Meter Readings

Electricity theft costs utility companies billions of dollars worldwide annually. The electricity consumption data recorded by consumers’ smart meters, coupled with the aggregate energy supply data recorded by master meters provide a new opportunity to pinpoint the source of electricity theft. Existing works on electricity theft pinpointing either assume linear attack modes which often limit their capability in identifying nonlinear electricity theft behaviours, or incur extra cost for model training or sensor installation. Our insight hinges upon the fact that the value of electricity theft loss (ETL) should be more correlated to the meter readings of energy thieves than to those of honest consumers. Guided by this insight, we formulate the problem of electricity theft pinpointing as a time-series correlation analysis problem which does not require linearity assumption of attack modes or any cost of training. Two coefficients are defined to evaluate the suspicion level of a consumer’s reported energy consumption pattern. A comprehensive set of experiments has been conducted on a real-world energy usage dataset with several types of attacks, and the results show that our proposed technique significantly improves the pinpointing accuracy when compared with other state-of-the-art methods.