Published on Aug 21, 2023
Science and technology with all its miraculous advancements has fascinated human life to a great extent that imagining a world without these innovations is hardly possible. While technology is on the raising slope, we should also note the increasing immoral activities. With a technical view, "Power Theft" is a non-ignorable crime that is highly prevalent, and at the same time it directly affects the economy of a nation.
Electricity is the modern man's most convenient and useful form of energy without which the present social infrastructure would not be feasible. The increase in per capita production is the reflection of the increase in the living standard of people. When importance of electricity is on the increasing side, then how much should theft of this energy or illegal consumption of power from the transmission lines be averted?
Power theft has become a great challenge to the electricity board. The dailies report that Electricity Board suffers a total loss of 8 % in revenue due to power theft every year, which has to controlled. Our paper identifies the Power theft and indicates it to the Electricity board through Power line. We had also dealt about the remote monitoring of an energy meter.
Embedded systems - a combination of software, hardware and additional mechanical parts that together forms a component of a larger system, to perform a specific function. It's a technology, characterized by high reliability, restricted memory footprint and real time operation associated with a narrowly defined group of functions. Automation has made the art of living comfortable and easy. Embedded systems have made the process of automation a most successful one. Here, we have focused on automotive, an area of embedded controllers, in which we have dealt with the Power theft identification and also about the remote monitoring of an energy meter.
There are many modern tools that assist in power theft identification. Some of them are :-
a.Tamper proof seals and labels.
b.Meter leaders.
c.Tamper resistant screws / locks.
d.Check meter and remote meter readers.
e.Tamper alarms and sensors.
This paper undertakes the Check meter and remote meter readers for power theft identification. In our case, the consumption recurred by the check meter is compared with the revenue meters consumption. If there is a difference, then it indicates either there is a theft or revenue meter malfunction . The check meter can also be used to monitor the energy used on the secondary of a distribution transformer serving several customer and compared to the sum of all the meter usage. Besides spotting out the line where power theft is suspected to occur, it also detects the amount of energy stolen. Compact size, lightweight for quick and high accuracy make the system more effective.
