nPlug: A smart plug for alleviating peak loads

The Indian electricity sector, despite having the world´s fifth largest installed capacity, suffers from a 12.9% peaking shortage. This shortage could be alleviated, if a large number of deferrable loads, particularly the high powered ones, could be moved from on-peak to off-peak times. However, conventional DSM strategies may not be suitable for India as the local conditions usually favor only inexpensive solutions with minimal dependence on the pre-existing infrastructure. In this work, we present nPlug, a smart plug that sits between the wall socket and deferrable loads such as water heaters, washing machines, and electric vehicles. nPlugs combine real-time sensing and analytics to infer peak periods as well as supply-demand imbalance and reschedule attached appliances in a decentralized manner to alleviate peaks whenever possible. They do not require any manual intervention by the end consumer nor any enhancements to the appliances or existing infrastructure. Some of nPlug´s capabilities are demonstrated using experiments on a combination of synthetic and real data collected from plug-level energy monitors. Our results indicate that nPlug can be an effective and inexpensive technology to address the peaking shortage.