Detection of Theft
Energy theft is a problem for suppliers and network operators with all customers bearing the costs of energy that is not paid for. The UK Government’s Smart Metering Impact Assessment indicates that £237 million could be avoided through the use of smart meters to reduce energy theft.
Suppliers have argued that having access to daily meter readings would allow them to track patterns of energy use much more closely and identify potential cases of theft.
Again, local processing within the meter is sufficient to detect theft. A “theft detection” applet could monitor consumption patterns and apply whatever theft detection algorithm was thought effective. When the algorithm detected a suspicious pattern then an alert message could be sent to the supplier.
That is: a theft-detection algorithm that could be executed on a server with the raw consumption data could equally well be executed by an applet running locally on the smart meter. As well as keeping private consumption data within the meter, the distributed local processing also reduces the costs associated with exporting the raw data and processing it centrally.