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.

The large-scale integration into electrical systems of intermittent power-generation sources, such as wind power plants, requires greater efforts and knowledge from operators to keep these systems operating efficiently. These sources require reliable output power forecasts to set up the optimal operating point of the electrical system. In previous research, the authors developed an evolutionary approach algorithm called RCDESIGN to optimize the hyperparameters and topology of Echo State Networks (ESN), and applied the model in different time series forecasting, including wind speed. In this paper, RCDESIGN was modified in some aspects of the genetic algorithm, and now it optimizes an ESN with augmented states (ESN-AS) and has been called RCDESIGN-AS. The evolutionary algorithm allows the search for the best parameters and topology of the recurrent neural network to be performed simultaneously. In addition, RCDESIGN-AS has the important characteristic of requiring little computational effort and processing time since it is not necessary for the eigenvalues of the reservoir weight matrix to be reduced and also due to the fact that the augmented states make it possible to reduce the number of neurons in the reservoir. The method was applied for wind speed forecasting with a 24-h ahead horizon using real data of wind speed from five cities in the Northeast Region of Brazil. All results obtained with the proposed method overcame forecasting performed by the persistence method, obtaining prediction gains ranging from 60% to 80% in relation to this reference method. In some datasets, the proposed method also yielded better results than the traditional ESN, showing that RCDESIGN-AS can be a powerful tool for wind-speed forecasting and possibly for other types of time series.