Smart Meter Data Analysis Issues: A Data Analytics Perspective

In recent years, the power sector has seen major developments in terms of infrastructure. Incorporating Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is one of the significant move that has modernized the power industry to what is called Smart Grid. As a result of this, an enormous amount of data have been generated by the devices that are installed in the Smart Grid system especially the Smart Meters which is considered to be the backbone of the Smart Grid. Analyzing the Smart Meter data for the mutual benefit of both the energy suppliers and its consumers is a data science problem. This paper attempts to address the challenges and issues relevant to data acquisition from a real-time setup and different data analytics perspective of Smart Meter data namely descriptive analytics, predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics. The discussion is extended to some of the publicly available Smart Meter datasets including residential customers. The paper also dictates possible immediate requirements and future directions in this area.