Electricity usage profile disaggregation of hourly smart meter data

This paper is motivated by the growing demand of disaggregating electricity consumption measured by smart meters, down to appliance level. The very low 15-min to 60- min granularity of energy measurements available for analysis, as is standard by the majority of nationwide smart metering programmes, is posing serious challenges. The non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) solutions for these very low data rates cannot leverage on low (1-60sec) to high rates (in the order of kHz to MHz) NILM approaches, and so far have not received much attention in the literature. In this paper, we propose a novel electricity profile hourly disaggregation of energy consumed (kWh) based on K-nearest neighbours (K-NN), that relies on features such as statistical measures of the energy signal, time usage profile of appliances and reactive power consumption (if available). We propose relative standard deviation as a metric to assess the quality of each feature per appliance. For validation, three publicly accessible real-world datasets are used, namely the REDD, REFIT and AMPds (Version 2), for up to 3 months.