Understanding how appliances in a house consume power is important when making intelligent and informed decisions about conserving energy. Appliances can turn ON and OFF either by the actions of occupants or by automatic sensing and actuation (e.g., thermostat). It is also difficult to understand how much a load consumes at any given operational state. Occupants could buy sensors that would help, but this comes at a high financial cost. Power utility companies around the world are now replacing old electro-mechanical meters with digital meters (smart meters) that have enhanced communication capabilities. These smart meters are essentially free sensors that offer an opportunity to use computation to infer what loads are running and how much each load is consuming (i.e., load disaggregation). We present a new load disaggregation algorithm that uses a super-state hidden Markov model and a new Viterbi algorithm variant which preserves dependencies between loads and can disaggregate multi-state loads, all while performing computationally efficient exact inference. Our sparse Viterbi algorithm can efficiently compute sparse matrices with a large number of super-states. Additionally, our disaggregator can run in real-time on an inexpensive embedded processor using low sampling rates.

With the cost of consuming resources increasing (both economically and ecologically), homeowners need to find ways to curb consumption. The Almanac of Minutely Power dataset Version 2 (AMPds2) has been released to help computational sustainability researchers, power and energy engineers, building scientists and technologists, utility companies, and eco-feedback researchers test their models, systems, algorithms, or prototypes on real house data. In the vast majority of cases, real-world datasets lead to more accurate models and algorithms. AMPds2 is the first dataset to capture all three main types of consumption (electricity, water, and natural gas) over a long period of time (2 years) and provide 11 measurement characteristics for electricity. No other such datasets from Canada exist. Each meter has 730 days of captured data. We also include environmental and utility billing data for cost analysis. AMPds2 data has been pre-cleaned to provide for consistent and comparable accuracy results amongst different researchers and machine learning algorithms.

A home-based intelligent energy conservation system needs to know what appliances (or loads) are being used in the home and when they are being used in order to provide intelligent feedback or to make intelligent decisions. This analysis task is known as load disaggregation or non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM). The datasets used for NILM research generally contain real power readings, with the data often being too coarse for more sophisticated analysis algorithms, and often covering too short a time period. We present the Almanac of Minutely Power dataset (AMPds) for load disaggregation research; it contains one year of data that includes 11 measurements at one minute intervals for 21 sub-meters. AMPds also includes natural gas and water consumption data. Finally, we use AMPds to present findings from our own load disaggregation algorithm to show that current, rather than real power, is a more effective measure for NILM.

Load disaggregation based on aided linear integer programming (ALIP) is proposed. We start with a conventional linear integer programming (IP)-based disaggregation and enhance it in several ways. The enhancements include additional constraints, correction based on a state diagram, median filtering, and linear-programming-based refinement. With the aid of these enhancements, the performance of IP-based disaggregation is significantly improved. The proposed ALIP system relies only on the instantaneous load samples instead of waveform signatures and, hence, works well on low-frequency data. Experimental results show that the proposed ALIP system performs better than conventional IP-based load disaggregation.

Datasets are important for researchers to build models and test how well their machine learning algorithms perform. This paper presents the Rainforest Automation Energy (RAE) dataset to help smart grid researchers test their algorithms that make use of smart meter data. This initial release of RAE contains 1 Hz data (mains and sub-meters) from two residential houses. In addition to power data, environmental and sensor data from the house’s thermostat is included. Sub-meter data from one of the houses includes heat pump and rental suite captures, which is of interest to power utilities. We also show an energy breakdown of each house and show (by example) how RAE can be used to test non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) algorithms.