Unlock Unprecedented Value from Smart Meter Data
Amidst the proliferation of rooftop solar photovoltaics and electric vehicles, advanced analytics of smart meter data are emerging as vital components in the toolkit of electricity distributors. Historical power quality data (voltages, currents, etc.) can provide significant insights and provide tremendous decision-support capabilities, enabling electricity distributors to better plan and operate their infrastructure.
While power flow analysis has always been in the toolkit of distribution engineers, there are key practical challenges in the context of low-voltage networks, which is the last-mile electricity distribution infrastructure connecting our houses and businesses. This is because power flow analysis requires accurate electrical models, which are typically poorly recorded or non-existent for low voltage distribution networks.
VoltMind’s innovation leverages historical smart meter data and artificial intelligence to enable next-generation, model-free applications in low-voltage distribution networks
VoltMind’s unique model-free approach bypasses the need of electrical models. Through the clever usage of machine learning and novel algorithms, our model-free technology can extract the physics of low-voltage networks purely from historical smart meter data. This innovative approach has been cultivated through three years of doctoral research and successfully demonstrated through high-profile industry-funded projects with real smart meter data (click here for more resources).
With our model-free capability, electricity distributors can assess DER hosting capacity and calculate dynamic operating envelopes in minutes, all without any electrical models
Of course, the opportunities from exploiting smart meter data don’t stop here. From a planning perspective, the time-series power data can be used to identify unrecorded DER installations by extracting the unique patterns of different devices. Historical data also enables statistical analysis to support activities such as load growth forecasting. In an operation setting, real-time streams of smart meter meter data can equip control room engineers with the needed visibility of their low-voltage infrastructure. Combined with advanced analytics, smart meter data has been widely used to enable functionalities such as network health monitoring, early fault detection, outage management, and customer voltage compliance assessment.
Truly advanced analytics of smart meter data is now a reality, and electricity distributors and customers can significantly benefit from it.