Training-Free Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring of Electric Vehicle Charging with Low Sampling Rate

Abstract: Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) is an important topic in smart-grid and smart-home. Many energy disaggregation algorithms have been proposed to detect various individual appliances from one aggregated signal observation. However, few works studied the energy disaggregation of plug-in electric vehicle (EV) charging in the residential environment since EVs charging at home has emerged only recently. Recent studies showed that EV charging has a large impact on smart-grid especially in summer. Therefore, EV charging monitoring has become a more important and urgent missing piece in energy disaggregation. In this paper, we present a novel method to disaggregate EV charging signals from aggregated real power signals. The proposed method can effectively mitigate interference coming from air-conditioner (AC), enabling accurate EV charging detection and energy estimation under the presence of AC power signals. Besides, the proposed algorithm requires no training, demands a light computational load, delivers high estimation accuracy, and works well for data recorded at the low sampling rate 1/60 Hz. When the algorithm is tested on real-world data recorded from 11 houses over about a whole year (total 125 months worth of data), the averaged error in estimating energy consumption of EV charging is 15.7 kwh/month (while the true averaged energy consumption of EV charging is 208.5 kwh/month), and the averaged normalized mean square error in disaggregating EV charging load signals is 0.19.