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With low voltage (LV) distribution networks increasingly being re-purposed beyond their original design specifications to accommodate low carbon technologies, the ability to accurately calculate their actual spare capacity is critical. Traditionally, within the Great Britain (GB) power system, there has been limited monitoring of LV distribution networks, making this difficult. This paper proposes a method for estimating spare capacity of unmonitored LV networks using demand data from customer Smart Meters. In particular, the proposed method infers existing LV network capacity, as well as losses, across scenarios where only a limited number of customers have Smart Meters installed. Typical daily load profiles across customers with Smart Meters are learned using a Dirichlet sampled Gaussian mixture model (GMM). Learned profiles are then applied to all unmetered customers to estimate network parameters. Method accuracy is assessed by comparing estimations with simulated, fully observed, LV network models. The method is also compared to benchmark models for establishing unobserved demand profiles. Overall, results in the paper show that the proposed method outperforms benchmark models in terms of accurately assessing substation headroom, particularly in scenarios where only 10–50% of customers have Smart Meters installed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phase imbalance in the U.K. and European low-voltage (415 V, LV) distribution networks causes additional energy losses. A key barrier against understanding the imbalance-induced energy losses is the absence of high-resolution time-series data for LV networks. It remains a challenge to estimate imbalance-induced energy losses in LV networks that only have the yearly average currents of the three phases. To address this insufficient data challenge, this paper proposes a new customized statistical approach, named as the clustering, classification, and range estimation (CCRE) approach. It finds a match between the network with only the yearly average phase currents (the data-scarce network) and a cluster of networks with time series of phase current data (data-rich networks). Then, CCRE performs a range estimation of the imbalance-induced energy loss for the cluster of data-rich networks that resemble the data-scarce network. Chebyshev's inequality is applied to narrow down this range, which represents the confidence interval of the imbalance-induced energy loss for the data-scarce network. Case studies reveal that, given such a few data from the data-scarce networks, more than 80% of these networks are classified to the correct clusters and the confidence of the imbalance-induced energy loss estimation is 89%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]