New Sun Road's anomaly detection project is developing machine learning tools to highlight unusual electrical events at solar microgrids, with applications in predictive maintenance, theft detection, and beyond.
The Project
One kind of the services that New Sun Road provides is a hardware and software platform that helps microgrid developers to monitor, manage, and optimize the systems that they build in developing economies. However, power theft has been a headache for many energy companies, and serves to motivate our project to
detect if and how villagers are stealing power from the solar power plant.
Background
Before going further into our methods, it’s important to have a basic understanding of power systems. Below is a demonstration on the process of the power usage in a solar microgrid using New Sun Road’s service. The red line represents the potential approach of a household skipping the meters and stealing power from the plant.