Reverse Active Power Flow in Electrical Energy Meters: a Contribution to a Better Understanding of False Positives of Irregularity in Consumer Units

Mitigating the non-technical electrical energy losses is an important goal to systems operators, governments and society. To achieve this goal, a number of different techniques has been proposed, and an important one is the use of smart meters. Smart meters are able to trigger an alarm whenever a monitored variable gets out from normal range. These alarms are used as guide to the selection of facilities to be inspected. One of those monitored variable is the active power: an alarm is triggered whenever the active power of a given facility is flowing from load to source. However, field inspections from these alarms have presented a big rate of false positives due to reverse active power flow caused by normal load conditions. This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of those irregularity false positives by presenting a study of the complex power locus due to regular and irregular load operations.