Simple analysis of energy consumption patterns recorded by smart meters can be used to deduce household occupancy. With access to higher‐resolution smart‐meter readings, we can infer more detailed ...information about the household including the use of individual electric appliances through non‐intrusive load monitoring techniques. The extent of privacy concerns caused by smart meters has proved to an obstacle in the roll‐out of smart meters in some countries. This highlights the need for investigating smart‐meter privacy. Mechanisms for ensuring smart‐meter privacy fall in broad categories of data manipulation, demand shaping, and load scheduling. In smart‐meter data manipulation, the smart meter collects real, potentially high‐resolution data about the energy consumption within the house. This data is then manipulated before communication with to utility providers and retailers. The manipulation could be non‐stochastic, such as aggregation, binning, and down‐sampling, or stochastic, such as additive noise. In demand shaping and load scheduling, smart‐meter readings are communicated without any interference but the consumption is manipulated by renewable energy sources, batteries, or shifting loads to render non‐intrusive load monitoring ineffective. In this study, the author reviews these approaches and presents several methods relying on homomorphic encryption, differential privacy, information theory, and statistics for ensuring privacy.
Ruth DeFord's book explores how tactus, mensuration, and rhythm were employed to articulate form and shape in the period from c.1420 to c.1600. Divided into two parts, the book examines the theory ...and practice of rhythm in relation to each other to offer new interpretations of the writings of Renaissance music theorists. In the first part, DeFord presents the theoretical evidence, introduces the manuscript sources and explains the contradictions and ambiguities in tactus theory. The second part uses theory to analyse some of the best known repertories of Renaissance music, including works by Du Fay, Ockeghem, Busnoys, Josquin, Isaac, Palestrina, and Rore, and to shed light on composers' formal and expressive uses of rhythm. DeFord's conclusions have important implications for our understanding of rhythm and for the analysis, editing, and performance of music during the Renaissance period.
Abstract
This paper compares the metrological performance of a sample of commercial domestic/residential smart meters for natural gas (G4). In particular, the performance degradation of electronic ...static and dynamic gas meters has been evaluated. The sample was composed by ultrasonic gas meters, thermal mass meters and diaphragm gas meters. The tests, performed on the gas meters, reproduce the most severe operating conditions (i.e. filed test) such as the influence of the gas composition, the temperature difference between gas and meter, the gas humidity and the presence of dust in the gas. Furthermore, the meters have been undergo to some endurance tests such as start and stop and to the high flowrate runs.
Smart meters have been widely installed to monitor residential electricity usage worldwide. This brings a serious privacy challenge for the customers, because the meter readings can possibly expose ...their activities in the house. To address this privacy issue, battery-based privacy preserving schemes have already been studied for several years. In these schemes, a rechargeable battery can both prevent the meter readings from leaking the customer's energy consumption and play a role of saving the cost. However, to the best of our knowledge, none of the existing schemes can achieve differential privacy and cost saving simultaneously. In this paper, we first propose a battery-based differential privacy-preserving (BDP) scheme. We further present two cost-friendly differential privacy-preserving (CDP) schemes by extending BDP scheme. Simulation analyses show that the privacy loss of both CDP schemes are smaller than the existing works. Meanwhile, both CDP schemes stably save the cost under multiple pricing policies.
The authors propose, design, and implement a low-cost universal smart energy meter (USEM) with demand-side load management. The meter can be used in the postpaid and prepaid modes with flexible ...tariff plans such as time of use, block rate tariff, and their combination. The smart meter comprises of a potential transformer, current transformer, and microcontroller unit with an embedded communication module. The connectivity among the utility authority, the smart meter, and consumer is established by authority identification number, meter identification number, and user identification number using the cellular network. The load management option of the meter controls electrical loads and provides emergency power during the power shortage. The USEM can be configured and reconfigured remotely simply by short message service without changing hardware. Besides, energy consumption status, meter tampering, and fault at the distribution end can be monitored with the proposed metering system. Here, a prototype of the smart meter is presented, and its effectiveness, flexibility, and versatility are experimentally demonstrated.
A significant progress in modern power grids is witnessed by the tendency of becoming complex cyber‐physical systems. As a fundamental physical infrastructure, smart meter in the demand side provides ...real‐time energy consumption information to the utility. However, ensuring information security and privacy in the meter data aggregation process is a non‐trivial task. This study proposes a distributed, privacy‐preserving, and secure meter data aggregation framework, backed up by Blockchain and homomorphic encryption (HE) technologies. Meter data are aggregated and verified by a hierarchical Blockchain system, in which the consensus mechanism is supported by the practical Byzantine fault tolerance algorithm. On the top of the Blockchain system, HE technology is used to protect the privacy of individual meter data items during the aggregation process. Performance analysis is conducted to validate the proposed method.
For accommodating rapidly increasing power demands, power systems are transitioning from analog systems to systems with increasing digital control and communications. Although this modernization ...brings many far-reaching benefits, the hardware and software newly incorporated into the power systems also incur many vulnerabilities. By taking advantage of these vulnerabilities, adversaries can launch various cyber/physical attacks to tamper with electricity meter readings, i.e., to steal electricity. It is reported that total worldwide annual economic losses caused by electricity theft reached up to almost one hundred billion dollars in recent years. With methods to tamper with meter readings becoming more versatile, secret, and flexible, electricity theft tends to get even more serious in modernized power systems. For preventing adversaries from stealing electricity, researchers have done a lot of works. Although some related surveys on these works exist, they are not updated or just discuss electricity theft in a specific region. This survey aims to gain a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of the electricity theft issue. After investigating how adversaries tamper with meter readings, we systematically survey all existing detection methods up to date, which is classified into machine learning- and measurement mismatch-based methods. Adverse effects and political and socioeconomic factors of electricity theft are also provided. This survey can help relevant researchers to shape future research directions, especially in the area of developing new effective electricity theft detection methods.
Electricity consumption has been intensifying due to population growth, climate change, urbanization, and the growing use of electronic devices, which are increasingly non-linear loads that cause ...poor power quality conditions. The trend of the Internet of Things has led to the creation of devices that encourage the efficient and effective utilization of electrical power. This in turn facilitates the development of modern power distribution structures such as smart grids. Consequently, this paper presents in detail the design, construction, and validation of a three-phase IoT smart meter intended to form part of the end-user demand side of a smart grid. The compact embedded system, with a manufacturing cost below $80 USD, features a unique electronic design that enables its installation in any load center and employs a straightforward IoT structure that includes WiFi technology for Internet communication. Also, a deployed web application was developed specifically to display the smart meter measurements. Unlike other smart meters, the proposed meter not only provides the amount of active energy consumption, but total and fundamental RMS current and voltage, active, reactive, and apparent power, reactive energy, power factor, and some power quality parameters such as, line frequency, amplitude of 64 current harmonics, and total harmonic distortion. Additionally, this study shows that the prototype achieves an absolute error of less than 1% in all its measurements. Finally, real-life applications of the developed device are demonstrated in residential environments.
•A smart meter embedded in a light IoT platform that sends data directly to the cloud.•Original electronic design for multiple 3-phase parameters without invasive tools.•Smart meter validated using different loads and tested in real-life environments.
Smart cities require interactive management of water supply networks and water meters play an important role in such a task. As compared to fully mechanical water meters, electromechanical water ...meters or fully electronic water meters can collect real-time information through automatic meter reading (AMR), which makes them more suitable for smart cities applications. In this paper, we first study the design principles of existing water meters, and then present our design and implementation of a self-powered smart water meter. The proposed water meter is based on a water turbine generator, which serves for two purposes: (i) to sense the water flow through adaptive signal processing performed on the generated voltage; and (ii) to produce electricity to charge batteries for the smart meter to function properly. In particular, we present the design considerations and implementation details. The wireless transceiver is integrated in the proposed water meter so that it can provide real-time water flow information. In addition, a mobile phone application is designed to provide a user with a convenient tool for water usage monitoring.
Static, or electronic, energy meters are replacing the conventional electromechanical meters. Consumers are sometimes complaining about higher energy readings and billing after the change to a static ...meter, but there is not a clear common or root cause at present. Electromagnetic interference has been observed between active infeed converters as used in photo-voltaic systems and static meters. Reducing the interference levels eliminated inaccurate reading in static meters. Several field investigations failed to identify a clear root cause of inaccurate readings of static energy meters. Experiments were performed in a controlled lab environment. Three-phase meters showed large deviations, even when supplied with an ideal sinusoidal voltage from a fourquadrant power amplifier. Large variations could be observed when non-linear, fast switching, loads were connected. A deviation of +276 % was measured with one static energy meter, +265% with a second and -46% with a third static energy meter. After dismantling it was revealed that the meters with the positive deviation used a Rogowski coil current sensor. The meter with a Hall effect-based current sensor gave the -46% deviation. The fourth meter, with a current transformer, resulted in -10% in one experiment and +8% in another experiment, where the deviations are with respect to a conventional electromechanical meter. Measurements were repeated with more meters and supplied from standard, low internal impedance, mains supply in the laboratory. Deviations of +475%, +566%, +569%, +581%, +582% and -31% and -32% were registered, with again the positive deviation for Rogowski coil current sensors and negative deviations for the Hall sensors.
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