Big Data Analytics for Power Distribution Systems using AMI and Open Source Tools

Advanced meters now account for almost half of the electric meters in the United States. In addition to reducing the costs of meter reading, these meters provide a vast increase in the amount of consumption data available to the utility. Many organizations, however, lack the expertise to analyze this data, so it languishes unused. This paper describes steps taken to make AMI data usable for day-to-day planning tasks at a medium-sized distribution utility. The proposed approach can be implemented on commodity hardware, providing a cost effective and secure platform for advanced analysis tasks.