Smart Meter Data Applied to Customer Rephasing for Technical Losses and Voltage Unbalance Mitigation

Smart meters have been deployed for replacing electromechanical energy meters around the world. As these new devices have the capability to transmit information, utilities seek for new applications and functionalities to add value for the new meters. In this context, this paper presents a method for customer rephasing using measurements of active and reactive powers acquired from customers' smart meters. The main purposes of such an application are to reduce feeders' technical losses and voltage unbalance. A representative express feeder from a Brazilian utility is utilized as a test system. Results show that the proposed method can reduce 33% of technical losses and up to 80% of the voltage unbalance in the system. Additionally, the probabilistic assessment shows that the method performance is robust to missing data, e.g., its efficiency is not impacted for cases when reactive power measurements are not available.