The role of electricity theft detection (ETD) is critical to maintain cost-efficiency in smart grids. However, existing methods for theft detection can struggle to handle large electricity consumption datasets because of missing values, data variance and nonlinear data relationship problems, and there is a lack of integrated infrastructure for coordinating electricity load data analysis procedures. To help address these problems, a simple yet effective ETD model is developed. Three modules are combined into the proposed model. The first module deploys a combination of data imputation, outlier handling, normalization and class balancing algorithms, to enhance the time series characteristics and generate better quality data for improved training and learning by the classifiers. Three different machine learning (ML) methods, which are uncorrelated and skillful on the problem in different ways, are employed as the base learning model. Finally, a recently developed deep learning approach, namely a temporal convolutional network (TCN), is used to ensemble the outputs of the ML algorithms for improved classification accuracy. Experimental results confirm that the proposed framework yields a highly-accurate, robust classification performance, in comparison to other well-established machine and deep learning models and thus can be a practical tool for electricity theft detection in industrial applications.

Today's electricity grid is rapidly evolving, with increased penetration of renewable energy sources (RES). Conventional Optimal Power Flow (OPF) has non-linear constraints that make it a highly non-linear, non-convex optimisation problem. This complex problem escalates further with the integration of RES, which are generally intermittent in nature. In this article, an optimal power flow model combines three types of energy resources, including conventional thermal power generators, solar photovoltaic generators (SPGs) and wind power generators (WPGs). Uncertain power outputs from SPGs and WPGs are forecasted with the help of lognormal and Weibull probability distribution functions, respectively. The over and underestimation output power of RES are considered in the objective function i.e. as a reserve and penalty cost, respectively. Furthermore, to reduce carbon emissions, a carbon tax is imposed while formulating the objective function. A grey wolf optimisation technique (GWO) is employed to achieve optimisation in modified IEEE-30 and IEEE-57 bus test systems to demonstrate its feasibility. Hence, novel contributions of this work include the new objective functions and associated framework for optimising generation cost while considering RES; and, secondly, computational efficiency is improved by the use of GWO to address the non-convex OPF problem. To investigate the effectiveness of the proposed GWO-based approach, it is compared in simulation to five other nature-inspired global optimisation algorithms and two well-established hybrid algorithms. For the simulation scenarios considered in this article, the GWO outperforms the other algorithms in terms of total cost minimisation and convergence time reduction.

The role of electricity theft detection (ETD) is critical to maintain cost-efficiency in smart grids. However, existing ETD methods cannot efficiently handle the sheer volume of data now available, being limited by issues such as missing values, high variance and non-linearity. An integrated infrastructure is also required for synchronizing diverse procedures in electricity theft classification. To help address such problems, a novel ETD framework is proposed that combines three distinct modules. The first module handles missing values, outliers, and unstandardised electricity consumption data. The second module employs a newly proposed hybrid class balancing approach to deal with highly imbalanced datasets. The third module utilises an improved artificial neural network (iANN) based classification engine, to predict electricity theft cases accurately and efficiently. We propose three distinctive mechanisms, including hyper-parameters tuning, regularization and skip connections, to improve the performance of standard ANN to handle more complex classification tasks using smart meter (SM) data. Furthermore, various structures of iANN are investigated to improve the generalization and function fitting capabilities of the final classification. Numerical results from real-world energy usage datasets confirm that the proposed ETD model has superior performance compared to existing machine learning and deep learning methods, and can effectively be applied to industrial applications.

Electricity load forecasting has always been a significant part of the smart grid. It ensures sustainability and helps utilities to take cost-efficient measures for power system planning and operation. Conventional methods for load forecasting cannot handle huge data that has a nonlinear relationship with load power. Hence an integrated approach is needed that adopts a coordinating procedure between different modules of electricity load forecasting. We develop a novel electricity load forecasting architecture that integrates three modules, namely data selection, extraction, and classification into a single model. First, essential features are selected with the help of random forest and recursive feature elimination methods. This helps reduce feature redundancy and hence computational overhead for the next two modules. Second, dimensionality reduction is realized with the help of a t-stochastic neighbourhood embedding algorithm for the best feature extraction. Finally, the electricity load is forecasted with the help of a deep neural network (DNN). To improve the learning trend and computational efficiency, we employ a grid search algorithm for tuning the critical parameters of the DNN. Simulation results confirm that the proposed model achieves higher accuracy when compared to the standard DNN.