Controller Based Power Theft Location Detection System

Power theft is one of the major problem in India. A large amount of energy is lost due to power theft and improper management. Therefore, it is required to design a system that would be able to detect the power theft as well as power theft location and take the necessary decision during normal and theft condition without any human interaction. This paper presents an efficient and cost effective approach to solve the problem of power theft in distribution lines. A controller based system is developed which takes the voltage and current readings from the LT side of distribution transformer and house hold energy meters. The readings from energy meter is transmitted to the main control unit at LT side of distribution transformer via any wireless communication technique. Based on additional voltage drop and current in distribution line due to power theft, the power theft location can be determined, simultaneously controller send the signal to circuit breaker to block the electricity and re-checking for theft, if theft is removed within four attempts then it will reinitialize the whole system otherwise it will send an alert message with theft location to the electricity provider or nearest substation. The testing of proposed system on MATLAB is found satisfactory.