Supervised Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring algorithm for Electric Vehicle Identification

Transport sector electrification represents an increase in the number of electric vehicles (EV), producing significant variations in the distribution network dynamics. As a result, bidirectional power flow, overload and load unbalances are caused at the low voltage level due to unexpected increased load peaks. Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) methods have been developed as a strategy for energy management systems, applied to the customer side producing energy savings. This research presents a NILM methodology based on a low complexity conventional supervised machine learning pipeline. Our approach uses Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Random Forest (RF) to detect the presence of a charging electric vehicle on the electricity network. By processing low sampling rate active power data, this approach provides a simple but feasible method that can be applied to smart meters. This provides useful data analysis for distribution network operators (DNO) to effectively deal with variability caused by these low carbon loads in the distribution grid. Achieving an overall efficacy of 92.68%, the proposed method can be compared with other state of the art methods developed under higher complexity techniques.