Resolving power consumption of variable power electronic loads using nonintrusive monitoring

This paper demonstrates a new estimator to resolve the average power consumption of a variable-speed drive (VSD) from other constant power loads using a spectral estimation method and a switching function technique for nonintrusive load monitoring (NILM) applications. The estimator uses the rectifier switching function to create adaptive estimating functions for the fundamental power from a finite set of current harmonics generated by the VSD. Experimental results show that the proposed VSD power estimator can significantly improve NILM's ability to resolve the VSD power consumption under small input voltage variation.