Developing a low-cost wireless energy meter with power quality measurements for smart grid applications represents a significant advance in efficient and accurate electric energy monitoring. In increasingly complex and interconnected electric systems, this device will be essential for a wide range of applications, such as smart grids, by introducing a real-time energy monitoring system. In light of this, smart meters can offer greater opportunities for sustainable and efficient energy use and improve the utilization of energy sources, especially those that are nonrenewable. According to the 2020 International Energy Agency (IEA) report, nonrenewable energy sources represent 65% of the global supply chain. The smart meter developed in this work is based on the ESP32 microcontroller and easily accessible components since it includes a user-friendly development platform that offers a cost-effective solution while ensuring reliable performance. The main objective of developing the smart meters was to enhance the software and simplify the hardware. Unlike traditional meters that calculate electrical parameters by means of complex circuits in hardware, this project performed the calculations directly on the microcontroller. This procedure reduced the complexity of the hardware by simplifying the meter design. Owing to the high-performance processing capability of the microcontroller, efficient and accurate calculations of electrical parameters could be achieved without the need for additional circuits. This software-driven approach with simplified hardware led to benefits, such as reduced production costs, lower energy consumption, and a meter with improved accuracy, as well as updates on flexibility. Furthermore, the integrated wireless connectivity in the microcontroller enables the collected data to be transmitted to remote monitoring systems for later analysis. The innovative feature of this smart meter lies in the fact that it has readily available components, along with the ESP32 chip, which results in a low-cost smart meter with performance that is comparable to other meters available on the market. Moreover, it is has the capacity to incorporate IoT and artificial intelligence applications. The developed smart meter is cost effective and energy efficient, and offers benefits with regard to flexibility, and thus represents an innovative, efficient, and versatile solution for smart grid applications.
This study investigates the implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms on resource-constrained edge devices, such as ESP32 and Raspberry Pi, within the context of smart grid (SG) applications. Specifically, it proposes a smart-meter-based system capable of classifying and detecting the Internet of Things (IoT) electronic devices at the extreme edge. The smart meter developed in this work acquires real-time voltage and current signals from connected devices, which are used to train and deploy lightweight machine learning models—Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) and K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN)—directly on edge hardware. The proposed system is integrated into the Artificial Intelligence in the Internet of Things for Smart Grids IAIoSGT architecture, which supports edge–cloud processing and real-time decision-making. A literature review highlights the key gaps in the existing approaches, particularly the lack of embedded intelligence for load identification at the edge. The experimental results emphasize the importance of data preprocessing—especially normalization—in optimizing model performance, revealing distinct behavior between MLP and KNN models depending on the platform. The findings confirm the feasibility of performing accurate low-latency classification directly on smart meters, reinforcing the potential of scalable AI-powered energy monitoring systems in SG.
Developing a low-cost wireless energy meter with power quality measurement for smart grid applications represents a significant advancement in efficient and accurate electrical energy monitoring.In increasingly complex and interconnected electrical systems, this device is essential in various applications, such as smart grids, enabling real-time energy usage monitoring. In such a context, smart meters expand the possibilities for sustainable and efficient energy use and promote better utilization of energy sources, especially non-renewable ones. According to the 2020 International Energy Agency (IEA) research, non-renewable energy sources represent 65% of the global total. The smart meter developed in this work is built based on the ESP32 microcontroller and easily accessible components, using a user-friendly development platform that offers a cost-effective solution while ensuring reliable performance. The main objective of the smart meter development was to enhance the software and simplify the hardware. Unlike traditional meters that perform electrical parameter calculations using complex hardware circuits, this project performed the calculations directly on the microcontroller. This approach reduced the complexity of the hardware, simplifying the meter’s design. With the high-performance processing capability of the microcontroller, efficient and accurate calculations of electrical parameters were achieved without the need for additional circuits. This software-driven approach with simplified hardware brought benefits such as reduced production costs, lower energy consumption, and increased meter development and updates flexibility. Furthermore, the integrated wireless connectivity in the microcontroller enables the transmission of collected data to remote monitoring systems for later analysis. The developed smart meter offers cost, energy efficiency, and flexibility benefits. It represents an innovative, efficient, and versatile solution for smart grid applications.
This paper presents a low-cost IoT-based architecture for residential electricity metering and consumption forecasting, centered on a single-phase smart meter with Wi-Fi connectivity and an ESP32-S3 microcontroller. The proposed system combines local signal acquisition with an end-to-end communication infrastructure based on MQTT, enabling real-time transmission of electrical measurements from the edge device to a remote server for storage, visualization, and predictive analysis. Experimental results demonstrated satisfactory metering performance, with an average current MAE of 0.23 A and MAPE of 4.56% when compared with a CW500 reference power analyzer. From the telecommunications perspective, the communication tests showed low gateway latency, ranging from 1.53 to 12.8 ms, and server latency between 203.63 and 290.86 ms, indicating adequate responsiveness for real-time monitoring applications. For consumption forecasting, the AI models were trained and evaluated using the Low Carbon London dataset rather than data collected entirely by the prototype; the 1D CNN achieved MAE = 0.009109 and MSE = 0.000195, while the LSTM obtained MAE = 0.015597 and MSE = 0.000538. The architecture integrates open-source networking and data services, including Mosquitto, Telegraf, InfluxDB, Grafana, and Docker Compose, resulting in a replicable and scalable platform for smart energy monitoring in residential IoT environments.