Metodologia para estimação de consumo de energia elétrica em unidades consumidoras localizadas em áreas rurais com uso de sistemas de irrigação

Abstract

Non-technical losses, in the latest decades, have become one of the main bottlenecks of the main electric power utilities, since they directly affect the utilities income, as well as the quality of electricity supplied. The most common causes of non-technical losses indicated by utilities are clandestine connections, fraud and reading errors. Depending on the socioeconomic characteristics of an utilities concession, the concentration of non-technical losses may be located, mostly, in urban areas or in regions located inland, in rural areas. At this case, mainly producing and irrigating regions, the location of possible occurrences of non-technical losses is extremely complex, due to the large extension of the feeders and the difficult access to some locations. Therefore, this work presents a methodology for detecting non-technical losses in irrigated sugarcane producing areas, whose pilot region for application the study was the municipality of Barretos, located in São Paulo. The methodology applies a clustering technique, the DBSCAN algorithm, to estimate the electricity consumption of the formed clusters, where this estimate was performed in two ways: using full irrigation management and salvage irrigation management, posteriorly comparing with the consumption of the consumer units that belong to the certain clusters. The results of the case studies showed that the estimated consumption of electricity in the clusters, considering full irrigation, brought a higher consumption result when compared to the consumption of the UCs of the respective cluster, while when considering salvage irrigation, the results were very close to the real consumption of the consumer units of the respective clusters in certain months of the year, showing the low irrigation depth that is applied in sugarcane crops.