Search Results (21)

The Ecuadorian electricity sector, until April 2024, presented losses of 15.64% (6.6% technical and 9.04% non-technical), so it is important to detect the areas that potentially sub-register energy in order to reduce Non-Technical Losses (NTLs). The “Empresa Eléctrica de Ambato Sociedad Anónima” (EEASA), as a distribution company, has, to reduce NTLs, incorporated many smart meters in special clients, generating a large amount of data that are stored. This historical information is analyzed to detect anomalous consumption that is not easily recognized and is a significant part of the NTLs. The use of machine learning with appropriate clustering techniques and deep learning neural networks work together to detect abnormal curves that record lower readings than the real energy consumption. The developed methodology uses three k-means validation indices to classify daily energy curves based on the days of the week and holidays that present similar behaviors in terms of energy consumption. The developed algorithm groups similar consumption patterns as input data sets for learning, testing, and validating the densely connected classification neural network, allowing for the identification of daily curves described by customers. The results obtained from the system detected customers who sub-register energy. It is worth mentioning that this methodology is replicable for distribution companies that store historical consumption data with Advanced Measurement Infrastructure (AMI) systems. Full article

This study introduces an orbital monitoring system designed to quantify non-technical losses (NTLs) within electricity distribution networks. Leveraging Sentinel-2 satellite imagery alongside advanced techniques in computer vision and machine learning, this system focuses on accurately segmenting urban areas, facilitating the removal of clouds, and utilizing OpenStreetMap masks for pre-annotation. Through testing on two datasets, the method attained a Jaccard index (IoU) of 0.9210 on the training set, derived from the region of France, and 0.88 on the test set, obtained from the region of Brazil, underscoring its efficacy and resilience. The precise segmentation of urban zones enables the identification of areas beyond the electric distribution company’s coverage, thereby highlighting potential irregularities with heightened reliability. This approach holds promise for mitigating NTL, particularly through its ability to pinpoint potential irregular areas. Full article

The current electricity default rates in continental countries, such as Brazil, pose risks to the economic stability and investment capabilities of distribution utilities. This situation results in higher electricity tariffs for regular customers. From a regulatory perspective, the key issue regarding this challenge is devising incentive mechanisms that reward distribution utilities for their operational and investment choices, aiming to mitigate or decrease electricity non-payment rates and avoid tariff increases for regular customers. Despite adhering to the principles of incentive regulation, the Brazilian Electricity Regulatory Agency (ANEEL) uses a methodological approach to define regulatory targets for electricity defaults tied to econometric models developed to determine targets to combat electricity non-technical losses (NTLs). This methodology has been widely criticized by electricity distribution utilities and academics because it includes many ad hoc steps and fails to consider the components that capture the specificities and heterogeneity of distribution utilities. This study proposes a fuzzy inference-based model for defining regulatory default targets built independently of the current methodological approach adopted by ANEEL and aligned with the principles of incentive regulation. An empirical study focusing on the residential class of electricity consumption demonstrated that it is possible to adopt a specific methodology for determining regulatory default targets and that the fuzzy inference approach can meet the necessary premises to ensure that the principles of incentive regulation and the establishment of regulatory targets are consistent with the reality of each electricity distribution utility. Full article

Non-technical losses (NTL) have been a growing problem over the years, causing significant financial losses for electric utilities. Among the methods for detecting this type of loss, those based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) have been the most popular. Many works use the electricity consumption profile as an input for AI models, which may not be sufficient to develop a model that achieves a high detection rate for various types of energy fraud that may occur. In this paper, using actual electricity consumption data, additional statistical and temporal features based on these data are used to improve the detection rate of various types of NTL. Furthermore, a model that combines both the electricity consumption data and these features is developed, achieving a better detection rate for all types of fraud considered. Full article

The digitization of distribution power systems has revolutionized the way data are collected and analyzed. In this paper, the critical task of harnessing this information to identify irregularities and anomalies in electricity consumption is tackled. The focus is on detecting non-technical losses (NTLs) and energy theft within distribution networks. A comprehensive overview of the methodologies employed to uncover NTLs and energy theft is presented, leveraging measurements of electricity consumption. The most common scenarios and prevalent cases of anomalies and theft among consumers are identified. Additionally, statistical indicators tailored to specific anomalies are proposed. In this research paper, the practical implementation of numerous artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, including the artificial neural network (ANN), ANFIS, autoencoder neural network, and K-mean clustering, is highlighted. These algorithms play a central role in our research, and our primary objective is to showcase their effectiveness in identifying NTLs. Real-world data sourced directly from distribution networks are utilized. Additionally, we carefully assess how well statistical methods work and compare them to AI techniques by testing them with real data. The artificial neural network (ANN) accurately identifies various consumer types, exhibiting a frequency error of 7.62%. In contrast, the K-means algorithm shows a slightly higher frequency error of 9.26%, while the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) fails to detect the initial anomaly type, resulting in a frequency error of 11.11%. Our research suggests that AI can make finding irregularities in electricity consumption even more effective. This approach, especially when using data from smart meters, can help us discover problems and safeguard distribution networks. Full article

Non-technical losses (NTLs) verified in the power distribution grids cause great financial losses to power utilities. In rural distribution grids, fraudulent consumers contribute to technical problems. The Southern region in Brazil contains more than 70% of the total rice production and power irrigation systems. These systems operate seasonally in distribution grids with high NTL conditions. This work aimed to present an artificial intelligence-based system to help power distribution companies detect potential consumers causing NTLs. This minimizes the challenge of maintaining compliance with current regulations and ensuring the quality of services and products. In the proposed methodology, historical energy consumption information, meteorological data, satellite images, and data from energy suppliers are processed by artificial intelligence, indicating the suspicious consumer units of NTL. This work presents every step developed in the proposed methodology and the tool application in a pilot area. We detected a high number of consumers responsible for NTLs, with an accuracy of 63% and an average reduction of 78% in the search area. These results corroborated the effectiveness of the tool and instigated the research team to expand the application to other rice production areas. Full article

Non-technical losses (NTLs) are one of the main problems that electricity distribution utilities face in developing regions such as Latin America, the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia. Particularly in Brazil, based on the socioeconomic and market variables concerning all the distribution utilities, the National Electric Energy Agency (ANEEL) has formulated several specifications of econometric models for panel data with random effects, all aimed at determining an index that reflects the difficulty of combating NTLs according to the intrinsic characteristics of each distribution area. Nevertheless, given the exhaustive search for combinations of explanatory variables and the complexity inherent to defining regulatory NTL targets, this process still requires the evaluation of many models through hypothesis and goodness-of-fit tests. In this regard, this article proposes an automatic model-selection technique for panel data regressions to better assist the Agency in establishing NTL regulatory targets for the distribution of utilities in this country. The proposed technique was applied to panel data containing annual observations from 62 Brazilian electricity distribution utilities from 2007 to 2017, thus generating 1,097,789 models associated with the regression types in the panel data. The main results are three selected models that showed more adherence to the actual capacity of Brazilian distribution utilities to reduce their NTLs. Full article

Non-Technical Losses (NTL) represent a serious concern for electric companies. These losses are responsible for revenue losses, as well as reduced system reliability. Part of the revenue loss is charged to legal consumers, thus, causing social imbalance. NTL methods have been developed in order to reduce the impact in physical distribution systems and legal consumers. These methods can be classified as hardware-based and non-hardware-based. Hardware-based methods need an entirely new system infrastructure to be implemented, resulting in high investment and increased cost for energy companies, thus hampering implementation in poorer nations. With this in mind, this paper performs a review of non-hardware-based NTL detection methods. These methods use distribution systems and consumers’ data to detect abnormal energy consumption. They can be classified as network-based, which use network technical parameters to search for energy losses, data-based methods, which use data science and machine learning, and hybrid methods, which combine both. This paper focuses on reviewing non-hardware-based NTL detection methods, presenting a NTL detection methods overview and a literature search and analysis. Full article

Nontechnical losses (NTL) are irregularities in the consumption of electricity and mainly caused by theft and fraud. NTLs can be characterized as outliers in historical data series. The use of computational tools to identify outliers is the subject of research around the world, and in this context, artificial neural networks (ANN) are applicable. ANNs are machine learning models that learn through experience, and their performance is associated with the quality of the training data together with the optimization of the model’s architecture and hyperparameters. This article proposes a complete solution (end-to-end) using the ANN multilayer perceptron (MLP) model with supervised classification learning. For this, data mining concepts are applied to exogenous data, specifically the ambient temperature, and endogenous data from energy companies. The association of these data results in the improvement of the model’s input data that impact the identification of consumer units with NTLs. The test results show the importance of combining exogenous and endogenous data, which obtained a 0.0213 improvement in ROC-AUC and a 6.26% recall (1). Full article

The current study uses a data-driven method for Nontechnical Loss (NTL) detection using smart meter data. Data augmentation is performed using six distinct theft attacks on benign users’ samples to balance the data from honest and theft samples. The theft attacks help to generate synthetic patterns that mimic real-world electricity theft patterns. Moreover, we propose a hybrid model including the Multi-Layer Perceptron and Gated Recurrent Unit (MLP-GRU) networks for detecting electricity theft. In the model, the MLP network examines the auxiliary data to analyze nonmalicious factors in daily consumption data, whereas the GRU network uses smart meter data acquired from the Pakistan Residential Electricity Consumption (PRECON) dataset as the input. Additionally, a random search algorithm is used for tuning the hyperparameters of the proposed deep learning model. In the simulations, the proposed model is compared with the MLP-Long Term Short Memory (LSTM) scheme and other traditional schemes. The results show that the proposed model has scores of 0.93 and 0.96 for the area under the precision–recall curve and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, respectively. The precision–recall curve and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve scores for the MLP-LSTM are 0.93 and 0.89, respectively. Full article

The high incidence of electricity theft, meter tampering, meter bypassing, reading errors, and defective and aged meters, among others, increases utility losses, especially non-technical losses (NTL). A utility in Ghana piloted a non-technical loss reduction program in 2019 to replace postpaid meters with anti-tamper, anti-fraud, and anti-theft smart prepaid meters. By using customer-level residential billing panel data from 2018 to 2019 obtained from the utility, we assess the effectiveness of this program using the difference-in-differences fixed-effect approach. On average, the results indicated that the reported amount of customers’ monthly electricity consumption increases by 13.2% when any tampered postpaid meter is replaced with a smart prepaid meter, indicating the NTLs by customers. We further employed quantile difference-in-differences regression and observed that reported energy consumption has increased for all households except those at the lower quantile (25th quantile). We conclude that smart prepaid metering could be a remedy to reduce NTLs for the electricity distribution sector in areas where electricity theft is rampant. Full article

Many electric utilities currently have a low level of smart meter implementation on traditional distribution grids. These utilities commonly have a problem associated with non-technical energy losses (NTLs) to unidentified energy flows consumed, but not billed in power distribution grids. They are usually due to either the electricity theft carried out by their own customers or failures in the utilities’ energy measurement systems. Non-technical energy losses lead to significant economic losses for electric utilities around the world. For instance, in Latin America and the Caribbean countries, NTLs represent around 15% of total energy generated in 2018, varying between 5 and 30% depending on the country because of the strong correlation with social, economic, political, and technical variables. According to this, electric utilities have a strong interest in finding new techniques and methods to mitigate this problem as much as possible. This research presents the results of determining with the precision of the existing data-oriented methods for detecting NTL through a methodology based on data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (multivariate data, analysis methods, classification, grouping algorithms, i.e., k-means and neural networks). The proposed methodology was implemented using the MATLAB computational tool, demonstrating improvements in the probability to identify the suspected customer’s measurement systems with error in their records that should be revised to reduce the NTLs in the distribution system and using the information from utilities’ databases associated with customer information (customer information system), the distribution grid (geographic information system), and socio-economic data. The proposed methodology was tested and validated in a real situation as a part of a recent Ecuadorian electric project. Full article

Utility companies have a great interest in identifying energy losses. Here, we focus on Non-Technical Losses (NTL), which refer to losses caused by utility theft or meter errors. Typically, utility companies resort to machine learning solutions to automate and optimise the identification of such losses. This paper extends an existing NTL-detection framework: by including knowledge-based NTL segmentation, we have detected some opportunities for improving the accuracy and the explanations provided to the utility company. Our improved models focus on specific types of NTL and therefore, the explanations provided are easier to interpret, allowing stakeholders to make more informed decisions. The improvements and results presented in the article may benefit other industrial frameworks. Full article

Electricity theft and fraud in energy consumption are two of the major issues for power distribution companies (PDCs) for many years. PDCs around the world are trying different methodologies for detecting electricity theft. The traditional methods for non-technical losses (NTLs) detection such as onsite inspection and reward and penalty policy have lost their place in the modern era because of their ineffective and time-consuming mechanism. With the advancement in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), newer and efficient NTL detection methods have been proposed by different researchers working in the field of data mining and AI. The AI-based NTL detection methods are superior to the conventional methods in terms of accuracy, efficiency, time-consumption, precision, and labor required. The importance of such AI-based NTL detection methods can be judged by looking at the growing trend toward the increasing number of research articles on this important development. However, the authors felt the lack of a comprehensive study that can provide a one-stop source of information on these AI-based NTL methods and hence became the motivation for carrying out this comprehensive review on this significant field of science. This article systematically reviews and classifies the methods explored for NTL detection in recent literature, along with their benefits and limitations. For accomplishing the mentioned objective, the opted research articles for the review are classified based on algorithms used, features extracted, and metrics used for evaluation. Furthermore, a summary of different types of algorithms used for NTL detection is provided along with their applications in the studied field of research. Lastly, a comparison among the major NTL categories, i.e., data-based, network-based, and hybrid methods, is provided on the basis of their performance, expenses, and response time. It is expected that this comprehensive study will provide a one-stop source of information for all the new researchers and the experts working in the mentioned area of research. Full article

The electrical losses in power systems are divided into non-technical losses (NTLs) and technical losses (TLs). NTL is more harmful than TL because it includes electricity theft, faulty meters and billing errors. It is one of the major concerns in the power system worldwide and incurs a huge revenue loss for utility companies. Electricity theft detection (ETD) is the mechanism used by industry and academia to detect electricity theft. However, due to imbalanced data, overfitting issues and the handling of high-dimensional data, the ETD cannot be applied efficiently. Therefore, this paper proposes a solution to address the above limitations. A long short-term memory (LSTM) technique is applied to detect abnormal patterns in electricity consumption data along with the bat-based random under-sampling boosting (RUSBoost) technique for parameter optimization. Our proposed system model uses the normalization and interpolation methods to pre-process the electricity data. Afterwards, the pre-processed data are fed into the LSTM module for feature extraction. Finally, the selected features are passed to the RUSBoost module for classification. The simulation results show that the proposed solution resolves the issues of data imbalancing, overfitting and the handling of massive time series data. Additionally, the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques; i.e., support vector machine (SVM), convolutional neural network (CNN) and logistic regression (LR). Moreover, the F1-score, precision, recall and receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve metrics are used for the comparative analysis. Full article