Effective and Efficient Smart Meter Data Analytics

Based in Charlottetown, PEI, Sprypoint is a software company that develops innovative solutions to the electric, gas, water, wastewater and telecom utility industries. Its software products have helped many utilities across North America to conserve energy, to save operational costs and to provide better customer service. These products also evolve over time, as the computational needs of the utility industry change over the years. In recent years, smart grids have started to replace conventional power grids worldwide, and many utility companies have deployed smart meters as fundamental components of smart grids. These smart meters typically collect consumption data at the end of each time interval which could be as short as 5 minutes. Thus, the amount of data collected from all the consumers in a city over a period of one year or more is large. Sprypoint has built software products that extract information from these data and visualize it, e.g., building histograms of a consumer's hourly or daily consumption. However, to help utilities better design dynamic pricing strategies (to reduce peak demand) and promote energy saving programs suitable for different consumer groups, more analytics methods need to be developed to automatically discover consumer patterns and trends over the massive amount of smart meter data. *Based on recent discussions with their clients, Sprypoint has identified that the following two analytics tasks are important: 1) understanding the thermal sensitivity of households and buildings, especially to identify those whose power consumption changes rapidly when the temperature outside changes, and 2) understanding the typical daily power consumption habits of consumers and categorizing them. This proposed project will thus develop methods to perform these two tasks, to build an effective smart meter data analytics system. Furthermore, since the amount of smart meter data is massive, we will also investigate the efficiency of these methods, to ensure that these tasks can be performed quickly.*