Load Profile Identification Interface for Consumer Online Monitoring Purposes in Smart Grids

This paper presents a method for the identification of consumer load profiles in a totally automatic way. The main objective was to develop an interface between utilities and consumers in order to obtain data from smart meters and identify the load profile. To this end, client/server software interfaces capable of transmitting and receiving data through TCP/IP sockets were developed. In this case, the consumer and utility were represented by client and server software, respectively. However, in order to be able to consider all the stages of this methodology, a database was created to store data related to consumers (meter readings, electricity bills and personal data). From this database, the utility software was able to furnish each consumer´s load profiles and to use this information to make decisions. Moreover, the software sends the electricity bill to the consumer by e-mail each month. Experimental and simulation results were obtained to validate the methodology and to show some benefits that can be achieved with the introduction of smart meters into power distribution systems in the context of load profile identification.