NONINTRUSIVE ELECTRICAL LOAD MONITORING IN COMMERCIAL BUILDINGS BASEDON STEADY-STATE AND TRANSIENT LOAD-DETECTION ALGORITHMS

Increased interest in energy scorekeeping, load forecasting and improv ed control of electricity-consuming equipment has focused attention on the instrumentation required to obtain the desired data. Work perform ed by the authors and other researchers has shown that individual load s can be detected and separated from rapid sampling of power at a sing le point serving a number of pieces of equipment, for example the elec trical service entrance for an entire house or all of the central spac e-conditioning equipment in a commercial building. This technique has worked well in tests in houses but faces more difficult challenges in commercial buildings. We present our results for this centralized or n on-intrusive load monitoring technique, applied to the space-condition ing equipment in an office/laboratory building in which equipment star t-up and shut-down was centrally observed and analyzed on the basis of changes in steady-state power. We further describe our enhanced techn ique for distinguishing loads by matching start-up transients to known patterns, and present laboratory tests of fully automated detection h ardware and software.