Getting Smarter About Mitigating Energy Losses

Energy loss is a real issue that can have significant financial and environmental impacts for utilities and their customers. It is easier and more costeffective to directly tackle the problem of losses rather than investing in new production methods. According to the World Bank, it is three times cheaper to save 1 kWh of electricity by improving the efficiency of the distribution network than investing in a new way of producing this kWh. In addition, the World Energy Council identifies nontechnical losses and high non-recovery rates as one of the most important factors contributing to financial losses. In Turkey, utilities are also facing these types of challenges and have put in place actions in order to address these concerns. Nevertheless, there is still more to be done. Investment in smart metering solutions can help address the issue of both technical and nontechnical losses. For instance, smart metering solutions can help: Locate and analyse energy losses on the network Analyse and optimise network infrastructure Detect tampering conditions Ensure proper billing Identify consumption anomalies and discrepancies This paper will highlight new ways to address energy losses, such as energy diversion detection and energy balance assessment. It will also demonstrate how utilities can experience significant cost-savings. It will detail specific examples of their energy losses in action and discuss how to identify and remediate operational problems based on Itron’s insight and experience, combined with our smart metering solutions and consulting services

Fraud detection in energy consumption: a supervised approach

Data from utility meters (gas, electricity, water) is a rich source of information for distribution companies, beyond billing. In this paper we present a supervised technique, which primarily but not only feeds on meter information, to detect meter anomalies and customer fraudulent behavior (meter tampering). Our system detects anomalous meter readings on the basis of models built using machine learning techniques on past data. Unlike most previous work, it can incrementally incorporate the result of field checks to grow the database of fraud and non-fraud patterns, therefore increasing model precision over time and potentially adapting to emerging fraud patterns. The full system has been developed with a company providing electricity and gas and already used to carry out several field checks, with large improvements in fraud detection over the previous checks which used simpler techniques.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Securing Smart Grid In-Network Aggregation through False Data Detection

Existing prevention-based secure in-network data aggregation schemes for the smart grids cannot e ectively detect accidental errors and falsified data injected by malfunctioning or compromised meters. In this work, we develop a light-weight anomaly detector based on kernel density estimator to locate the smart meter from which the falsified data is injected. To reduce the overhead at the collector, we design a dynamic grouping scheme, which divides meters into multiple interconnected groups and distributes the verification and detection load among the root of the groups. To enable outlier detection at the root of the groups, we also design a novel data re-encryption scheme based on bilinear mapping so that data previously encrypted using the aggregation key is transformed in a form that can be recovered by the outlier detectors using a temporary re-encryption key. Therefore, our proposed detection scheme is compatible with existing in-network aggregation approaches based on additive homomorphic encryption. We analyze the security and eÿciency of our scheme in terms of storage, computation and communication overhead, and evaluate the performance of our outlier detector with experiments using real-world smart meter consumption data. The results show that the performance of the light-weight detector yield high precision and recall

Fault-Tolerant Secure Data Aggregation Schemes in Smart Grids: Techniques, Design Challenges, and Future Trends

Secure data aggregation is an important process that enables a smart meter to perform efficiently and accurately. However, the fault tolerance and privacy of the user data are the most serious concerns in this process. While the security issues of Smart Grids are extensively studied, these two issues have been ignored so far. Therefore, in this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of fault-tolerant and differential privacy schemes for the Smart Gird. We selected papers from 2010 to 2021 and studied the schemes that are specifically related to fault tolerance and differential privacy. We divided all existing schemes based on the security properties, performance evaluation, and security attacks. We provide a comparative analysis for each scheme based on the cryptographic approach used. One of the drawbacks of existing surveys on the Smart Grid is that they have not discussed fault tolerance and differential privacy as a major area and consider them only as a part of privacy preservation schemes. On the basis of our work, we identified further research areas that can be explored

A Survey on Cyber Security for Smart Grid Networks

Smart grid is a electrical grid in which power generation units, transmission units, distribution units and electricity consumers are connected using advanced communication and information technologies. It is a new form of next generation power grid. Most of the countries across the globe are transforming their existing electrical grids to smart grid and hence smart grid technology is progressing worldwide. Smart grid provides a bi-directional flow of electricity and information from generation to transmission to distribution and hence more exposed to attacks. Many advanced communication technologies have been identified for smart grid usages. A secure communication infrastructure is a critical component of smart grid systems. Success of smart grids highly depends on secure communication network. Thus cyber security of smart grid networks is very important. In this paper, we summarize the cyber security threats, possible vulnerabilities and existing standards and solutions available for cyber security in smart grids networks based on the available reference material. DOI: 10.17762/ijritcc2321-8169.15050