Ethernet based smart energy meter for power quality monitoring and enhancement

Abstract

With the increasing demand for power accompanied by power theft, unpaid bills, power quality problems and poor utilization of energy, smart energy meters are primarily employed to monitor, control and educate customers about energy consumption. However, in India, still no clarity is observed on power quality monitoring. The power quality limits vary from state to state. No user interface exists for displaying energy consumption data. This paper implements a methodology to monitor the power quality parameters using Ethernet based smart energy meter. Energy consumption data is sent to server by the smart energy meter and stored there. Graphical programming of LabVIEW is utilized to fetch data from server and then various power quality parameters are calculated using the virtual instrumentation created. Additionally, at household level, smart energy meter indentifles appliances as inductive, capacitive and resistive and, automated method is developed to schedule loads such that the reactive power is cycled within the loads. This diminishes the need for higher dependency of reactive power from utility which improves the power factor and also defeat the usage of high cost Power Factor Correction (PFC) circuits for households.