"Electric utility companies are making significant investments in smart grid technologies to improve the way power is generated and delivered to customers. Investments such as the replacement of electromechanical meters with smart meters has provided several benefits including more accurate electricity bills and the ability to remotely connect or disconnect service. In addition to these benefits, smart meters can also be used to address the lack of visibility into the electric distribution system. While many utilities have visibility at substations through supervisory control and data acquisition systems, much of the distribution system beyond the substation remains unmonitored. The objective of this thesis is to show how utilities can gain more visibility into the distribution system by analyzing smart meter data. Smart meter outage events, when integrated into outage management systems, can help utilities locate outages faster and restore power to customers. In this thesis, smart meter outage events are compared with historical outage incidents from an outage management system. The results of the comparison show that there are several challenges to overcome before these events can be integrated into outage management systems. These challenges include processing momentary smart meter outages and ensuring that the electric model is correct. Smart meters can also be used to identify power quality issues such as drastic changes in voltage levels. An average voltage over a five-day period was obtained for 700,000 smart meters and roughly 1% had a voltage above the acceptable tolerance range. Many of these issues were caused by the failure of a distribution transformer or voltage regulator. By analyzing smart meter outage and voltage data, utilities can be more proactive in addressing customer and system issues."--Page ii.
Read
