Remote Detection and Identification of Illegal Consumers in Power Grids

Electricity theft is a common problem in electric power systems around the world. It causes heavy economic losses and badly affects the reliability of the power grid. One of the most common and simplest methods of stealing electricity is tapping energy directly from the overhead power feeder. The other most common method of theft is the tampering with meters to reduce the recorded consumption by illegal ways. In this paper, we present a cost-effective remote detection and identification method for detecting illegal electricity consumption. It also identifies the illegal user in real time without any pre-processing or extensive analysis of a huge amount of collected data. Moreover, it preserves the privacy of customers by destroying the high-resolution data of instantaneous power consumption collected from customers' meters. The system can detect suspicious consumer(s) online and sends notifications to the utility control center with the ID number(s) of the suspicious meter(s) or the amount of load that has been tapped to the power feeder within the area served by a single distribution transformer. The extensive simulations using Simulink were conducted to validate the proposed scheme. For further validation of the scheme, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation was conducted using three microcontroller-based meters and Simulink environment. The results of both types of experiments showed that the proposed scheme can successfully detect and identify fraudulent users in real time.