Methods and applications for electricity demand disaggregation in developing countries

Electricity demand disaggregation describes the identification of appliance level loads from aggregate power measurements. This topic is widely researched, but the majority of projects focus on grid connected customers with strong connections and many loads; however, there are numerous applications for disaggregation in the intelligent, off-grid systems emerging in developing countries. In this paper, we describe an established electricity demand disaggregation method, the Hidden Semi-Markov Model (HSMM), present results using this method to dissagregate demand data from a real microgrid in Kenya, and discuss applications for disaggregation in developing countries.