Assessment of Features in Smart Meters to Enhance Consumers Safety

Smart meter provides the vital real time data to the smart grid and is considered the grid's heart. There are many stakeholders to the smart metering program; Utilities, government agencies, `prosumers', and society in general. But, in our opinion it is the electricity consumers who tend to benefit the most from this. Smart meters are equipped with capable measurement and fast computational engine along with latching relays to connect/disconnect supply to the consumer. In this paper, an additional layer of second line of safety is proposed utilising the existing hardware and adding advanced embedded algorithms for consumer safety against `fire from short circuit' and `electric shock'. Fault detection and disconnection response time data generated in the proof of concept experiment is compared with conventional protection class devices.