A novel non-intrusive load monitoring method based on ResNet-seq2seq networks for energy disaggregation of distributed energy resources integrated with residential houses

The increasing effects of global warming and energy depletion have raised concerns about the pollution caused by traditional oil and fossil energy usage. Distributed energy resources (DERs) have emerged as promising techniques to address these issues. However, the growing proportion of power injection from DERs presents technical challenges such as power quality decline and power flow reversal, which may destabilize the grid. Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) is a promising and cost-effective approach that can provide residential power information to improve grid scheduling, dispatching, and optimize residential power consumption behavior. This paper proposes a novel NILM method that can decompose the power of both household appliances and DERs integrated with residential houses. The proposed approach employs a data segment method that utilizes adaptive window lengths to identify the behavior of DERs based on the operating periods and characteristics of different equipment. A non-intrusive load monitoring method is proposed based on the ResNet-seq2seq framework to address the problem of model degradation and gradient vanishing. Post-processing techniques are applied to the output results using a feature list of the target equipment. Experiments are conducted on a dataset organized based on the REDD and Pecan Street datasets to demonstrate the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed method. The results show that compared to the start-of-the-art CNN-seq2seq model, the proposed method achieved 54.95%, 69.18%, 56.95%, and 84.98% reduction in MAE for PV, EV, refrigerators, and microwaves, respectively.