EPRI NILM 2013 Workshop in Palo Alto

I recently attended the two day 2013 NILM workshop hosted by EPRI at their Palo Alto office. The workshop brought together mostly utilities and vendors from the USA, although there were also attendees from government departments, non-profits and also some academics. The agenda was centred around discussions of data collection, use cases and future collaboration. Unfortunately, this meant there wasn't any discussion of algorithmic detail, given that vendors generally prefer to keep such information private.

In terms of outcomes to the workshop, two working groups were formed. One to study the performance metrics required to assess the accuracy of NIALM approaches, and a second to define a set of data output standards to ensure interoperability between multiple NIALM systems. As yet, I don't have any further information regarding either working group, but if you leave a comment on this post I'd be happy to forward your information onto the group leaders.

From my perspective, the most interesting thing I learned from this workshop was about the smart meter deployments in the states of California and Texas. It turns out that both deployments are already complete, and the existing infrastructure is capable of reporting the household power demand over the home area demand at roughly 10 second intervals. However, in order to activate this functionality, each household must request their utility to remotely flick a software switch to start the smart meter communicating with any compatible devices. This situation is particularly interesting to myself since it shares the same data rates and availability with the smart meters due to by deployed in the UK by 2020.