KEYNOTE

Applications of Non-intrusive Load Monitoring to Power Systems and New NILM-type Problems

Johanna Mathieu, University of Michigan

Though power systems researchers still do not agree what the term “smart grid” really means, most would probably agree that smart grids have enhanced metering, telemetry, and control infrastructure to increase situational awareness, hopefully leading to improved operations and real-time control (though you will not find that definition on Wikipedia!). Converting a grid into a smart grid has generally entailed deployments of network sensors and advanced metering infrastructure (i.e., smart meters). However, I believe that the really exciting stuff is behind-the-meter: flexible electric loads, storage, and photovoltaic generation, all of which can be coordinated to provide a variety of services to distribution systems and power markets. Here, of course, is where the fields of power systems and non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) intersect. How can power systems leverage NILM to “see” behind-the-meter? What specific applications exist now, or might exist in a future “smarter” grid? What power system challenges might inspire new NILM-type problems? In this talk, I will discuss how NILM can be leveraged for residential demand response – both characterizing the resource and for real-time load coordination. I will also describe our work on “feeder-level energy disaggregation,” a problem that is inherently related to NILM.

Johanna Mathieu is an associate professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Prior to joining Michigan in 2014, she was a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. She completed her PhD at the University of California at Berkeley in 2012. She is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award and the Ernest and Bettine Kuh Distinguished Faculty Award. Her research focuses on ways to reduce the environmental impact, cost, and inefficiency of electric power systems via new operational and control strategies. She is particularly interested in developing new methods to actively engage distributed flexible resources such as energy storage, electric loads, and distributed renewable resources in power system operation, which are especially important in power systems with high penetrations of intermittent renewable energy resources such as wind and solar.