Disaggregation of domestic smart meter energy data
Daniel Kelly, William Knottenbelt, Andrew Davison, Engineering And Physical Sciences Research Council
2017
Many countries are rolling out smart electricity meters. A smart meter measures the aggregate energy consumption of an entire building. However, appliance-by-appliance energy consumption information may be more valuable than aggregate data for a variety of uses including reducing energy demand and improving load forecasting for the electricity grid. Electricity disaggregation algorithms – the focus of this thesis – estimate appliance-by-appliance electricity demand from aggregate electricity
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... and. This thesis has three main goals: 1) to critically evaluate the benefits of energy disaggregation; 2) to develop tools to enable rigorous disaggregation research; 3) to advance the state of the art in disaggregation algorithms. The first part of this thesis explores whether disaggregated energy feedback helps domestic users to reduce energy consumption; and discusses threats to the NILM. Evidence is collected, summarised and aggregated by means of a critical, systematic review of the literature. Multiple uses for disaggregated data are discussed. Our review finds no robust evidence to support the hypothesis that current forms of disaggregated energy feedback are more effective than aggregate energy feedback at reducing energy consumption in the general population. But the absence of evidence does not necessarily imply the absence of any beneficial effect of disaggregated feedback. The review ends with a discussion of ways in which the effectiveness of disaggregated feedback may be increased and a discussion of opportunities for new research into the effectiveness of disaggregated feedback. We conclude that more social science research into the effects of disaggregated energy feedback is required. This motivates the remainder of the thesis: to enable cost-effective research into the effects of disaggregated feedback, we work towards developing robust NILM algorithms and software. The second part of this thesis describes three tools and one dataset developed to enable disaggregation research. The first of these tools is [...]
doi:10.25560/49452
fatcat:dyu5oijj3jgdhal6wr2je6vaui