Development and Calibration of an Open Source, Low-Cost Power Smart Meter Prototype for PV Household-Prosumers

Abstract

Smart meter roll-out in photovoltaic (PV) household-prosumers provides easy access to granular meter measurements, which enables advanced energy services. The design of these services is based on the training and validation of models. However, this requires temporal high-resolution data for generation/load profiles collected in real-world household facilities. For this purpose, this research developed and successfully calibrated a new prototype for an accurate low-cost On-time Single-Phase Power Smart Meter (OSPPSM), which corresponded to these profiles. This OSPPSM is based on the Arduino open-source electronic platform. Not only can it locally store information, but can also wirelessly send these data to cloud storage in real-time. This paper describes the hardware and software design and its implementation. The experimental results are presented and discussed. The OSPPSM demonstrated that it was capable of in situ real-time processing. Moreover, the OSPPSM was able to meet all of the calibration standard tests in terms of accuracy class 1 (measurement error 1%) included in the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) standards for smart meters. In addition, the evaluation of the uncertainty of electrical variables is provided within the context of the law of propagation of uncertainty. The approximate cost of the prototype was 60 € from eBay stores.