Low voltage current estimation using AMI/smart meter data

Knowledge of the currents is a key foundation for smart grid applications. However, knowledge of low voltage currents is generally poor. The new information streams from advanced metering infrastructure (AMI)/smart meters and the monitoring of distribution substations offer the opportunity of rectifying this. Unfortunately, often not all the smart meter readings will be available in real-time. For example, this situation will arise when older (non-compliant) smart meters do not have real-time reporting capabilities. This paper investigates how knowledge of the substation currents can be combined with the available real-time AMI/smart meter readings and the historical readings from the non-real-time meters, to estimate these missing values. It is found that the k-nearest neighbor weighted average approach performs best but that the gains over using simpler methods are relatively modest.