On the Impact of Socioeconomic Variables on Non-Technical Losses in Low Voltage Distribution Systems

The energy consumed without billing indicates non-technical losses. It is a result of energy theft and connection fraud. These losses affect the entire utility economic chain, also impacting technical losses amount. Thus, actions such as field inspections are important to mitigate the problem. Analyzing non-technical losses in low voltage consumer environments, composed mostly of residential units, relationships occur between socioeconomic aspects and losses, due to the heterogeneity of the population's living conditions, mainly in developing countries like Brazil. Due to advances in data processing techniques and the current information volume, the influence of these exogenous aspects can be included in loss expectation models, improving the assertiveness of inspection planning, for example. Thus, this paper seeks to present the relationships between non-technical loss results and socioeconomic information through statistical analysis and using Mutual Information applied to non-linear relationship feature selection. The study will be developed to the demographic units composing an important city in the southern region of Brazil. However, this model is easily replied to other interest regions. The results showed greater relationships between non-technical losses and aspects of population income and literacy.