Residential Electrical Load Monitoring and Modeling – State of the Art and Future Trends for Smart Homes and Grids

Building energy consumption accounts for a large fraction of the total global energy usage, and considerable energy savings are expected to be achieved in this respect through residential electrical load monitoring. Due to the limitations on the practical implementation of in-depth and expensive monitoring systems, non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) is becoming a hot topic. In this paper, an overview of the state of the art residential electrical load monitoring is presented. Different from previous reviews, the applications of load monitoring are particularly addressed, based on which, technical challenges of load monitoring techniques, including NILM, are identified and thoroughly discussed, together with possible developments and trends predicted from the authors’ perspective.