When Jim got the call from the fire department that a recent house fire was caused by illegal wiring for basement lighting installed to grow marijuana, he wasn’t really surprised. Everyone knew that these grow-ops exist, and the police had a good record of finding them and shutting them down. Like mushrooms after the proverbial autumn rains they keep coming back. But with this last fire things were different: a firefighter was recovering from serious electrical burns that came from contact with live wires while fighting the fire. The main power breaker had been shut off, but no one knew that the growers had diverted the power off the medium voltage lines to a hidden transformer and breaker panel in the attic. The firefighter was expected to live, but it was a very close call.

This scenario is not pure fiction. The risk to property and emergency response crews is real. Grow operators and drug lab operators routinely try to hide their efforts, and stealing power is one of the key tricks to keeping the operation under the radar. Smart meters have eliminated tampering by everyone except the very ill-advised, so the only way to avoid hefty power bills – and the attention these can draw – is to tap into the grid well before the metering point.

Globally, energy losses cost electrical distribution companies more than $200B per year. In the USA, this figure is about $24B and approximately one-quarter of that – $6B annually – is due to theft. The culprits are widespread and touch all corners of society, from the high-end homeowner trying to save a few dollars to keep the house cool or the swimming pool warm, to the local pizza joint or nightclub owner that bribed his electrician to bypass the main breaker panel while renovating the adjoining expansion.

Some electric utility companies refuse to believe they have much theft. A very lean distribution grid might run with around 3.5 to 4.5 percent technical loss. Nontechnical losses, which include theft as well as metering errors, unmetered premises, and other commercial errors) can range from a low 0.5 to a full 100 percent on certain distribution lines.

Recovering these losses translates into pure profit:

• The electricity has already been generated and transmitted through the system.
• Every stolen kWh that is disconnected no longer needs to be generated.
• Every stolen kWh that is not generated does not create greenhouse gases.
• Every stolen kWh that is paid for goes straight to the bottom line on the annual financial report.

And the payback also pays forward: once the theft or loss has been discovered and recovered, the avoided losses and increased revenue will continue for years.

Most power utilities have found that the promise that smart meters would eliminate all theft cannot be fulfilled. Experience shows that a reduction of 20 to 25 percent in theft can be attained but the rest can only be found by investigations on the upstream lines. As awareness increases of the capabilities of smart meters and meter data analytics, thieves will increasingly turn to upstream diversion to meet their needs.

This creates a very challenging problem for the distribution company:

• How can they cost-effectively and quickly pinpoint theft?
• Find those wiring errors and incorrectly installed smart meters?
• How do you pinpoint assets that are over or near rated load?
• Identify poor power factor, phase imbalance, and load anomalies?

Unfortunately, too many grid operators do what Jim did in our opening story – wait for the phone to ring with a police report, news of a house fire, or an irate customer complaining about yet another outage.

The conventional alternative is very expensive, with the cost of each line-mounted, pole-top or pad-mounted monitoring device typically around $3,000 to $4,000, accounting for the device, installation, the communications and the data integration. For even a modest distribution company with 1,000,000 customers, 500 feeder lines and perhaps 200,000 transformers, the cost of such a system could easily be tens of millions of dollars. The result is that the distribution grid remains ‘dark’ except for a few problem areas where monitoring is deemed worthwhile. In the end, generating 52 weeks of ongoing continuous data from any one such monitoring location has limited value once theft, diversions, and losses have been eliminated. Data processing and management costs, IT costs, and operating costs increase, with diminishing returns.

True Grid Insight and SenseNET
SenseNET offers a more pragmatic and much more affordable approach to implementing a theft & loss mitigation program; it makes it possible to gather one week of load profile data from each of 52 locations for the same cost as 52 weeks at one location. Such a temporary line sensing system can be used to quickly and easily find the cause of theft or other losses, and then used again and again to discover more.

With the SenseNET data stored in the cloud, and using True Grid Insight software analytics to perform intelligent energy audits one distribution line at a time, the IT costs are very low and the benefits immediately apparent. Theft and losses are found immediately, leading to direct revenue recovery. Heavily loaded transformers, severe load imbalances, and other operating conditions are immediately rectified. Over the course of 2 to 3 years, the system can give a ‘roving’ view of the whole distribution grid, built up from a patchwork of snapshots of real operating conditions on the lines. This leads to True Grid Insight, and makes it possible to plan for ways to optimize the grid operation, more accurate demand forecasts, and much more.

By quickly eliminating theft and finding losses, the distribution grid company can:

• increase grid efficiency to gain higher reliability
• reduce unnecessary generation to lower greenhouse gases
• eliminate illegal wiring leading to fewer building fires and higher safety

Rather than fixed monitoring at just a few hundred or thousand points in the distribution grid, a roving sensor system like SenseNET makes it possible to create a high-resolution view of actual distribution grid operating conditions. This approach shines a light on the dark corners of the grid downstream from substation SCADA and upstream from smart meters. The resulting True Grid Insight enables grid optimization, eliminates theft, finds high loss transformers and transformers with imbalanced loads, loads with poor power factor, and much more.

Actual deployments have found the recovered revenue is substantially greater than the cost of deploying the system. One early 1-week deployment was able to pinpoint almost four times as many losses compared to the system the customer was using previously, which included smart meters, tamper detect flags, load profile analysis, outage alerts, etc. Savings and recovered revenue is already being measured in the tens of millions of dollars, for utilities throughout North America and internationally.

As the operator of an electrical coop, investor-owned utility or any other distribution company, you have an obligation to your members, your owners, your investors and your community:

• Avoid ongoing losses!
• Improve public safety!
• Reduce your carbon footprint!
   

About the author

Rudi Carolsfeld joined Awesense in 2013 as Vice President of Sales and Chief Customer Advocate, defining and guiding the global sales and marketing efforts for the expansion of the company’s portfolio of revenue assurance product and services globally.

Rudi has more than 20 years of technical sales and marketing experience through his engagements with two other outstanding companies solving Smart Grid problems that were both market leaders in their respective fields. He was at Power Measurement Ltd. from 1993 to 2007 where he held numerous roles in engineering, marketing and domestic & international sales, holding the title of Sales Director for Europe when the company was acquired by Schneider Electric in 2005. From 2007 to 2013, while at RuggedCom Inc., Rudi had responsibility for sales, holding the position of Vice President Asia Pacific when the company was acquired by Siemens in 2012. Under the Siemens RuggedCom banner, he was Vice President, Global Product Business Development.

Rudi has a Bachelor’s degree and a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Victoria and has sat strategic marketing and technical Japanese courses at Stanford University and MIT, respectively. He has been a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) since 1983, has authored numerous technical journal papers and white papers, and is co-inventor of a multi-featured power meter. Rudi lives with his family in Victoria, Canada.