Electronic – Can power theft on a large scale be stopped

power-consumptionpower-engineering

Reading this article, I started wondering if there is any way to stop people stealing electricity from a power grid. Let me clarify, the only techniques I have seen (and can think of) is either to

  1. rely on an honor system where you trust people not to steal and pay for all the power they consume

  2. or have visual inspections where a power company just sends its people out they look for illegal hookups and then either just disconnecting them and/or legal action against the thieves.

For the second case, as the article says, power company employees cut the hookups and then the hookups are back up again in five minutes and legal action of any kind is useless and hopeless thanks to massive corruption at all levels.

My question here is, is there any method or technique based on principles of electromagnetism/electrical engineering/grid designing that can prevent/minimize such theft or even detect such theft like where it is happening or who is doing it? Is there anyway to localize it and then cut only the thieves instead of an entire neighborhood including innocents who are not stealing at all? Can a power grid be designed (from scratch if needed) to help with this? Can at least the theft be made so difficult or expensive that it won't be worthwhile for people to steal it?

I understand that security of any kind is a difficult problem and no matter what the system, there is always a way to break it. But in this police/legal action is absolutely useless so how can power distribution be made secure enough that it is beyond the scope/ability/affordability of an average citizen to just brazenly and easily steal all the power they want. Thank you.

Best Answer

An "honour system" or visual inspections are not the only two options.

Detecting tapping-off points is possible using a time domain reflectometer (TDR). This is a measurement instrument that uses transmission line physics to determine locations and types of "impedance discontinuities" (such as illegal taps) on a transmission line.

Operating principle

TDRs work by sending a "ping" of energy into a transmission line and watching the "echoes" that come back. The transmission line can be an optical transmission line (i.e. an optical fibre) or, in our case, an electrical transmission line (a overhead power line or underground power cable.)

This works because signals will partially or fully reflect off any discontinuity in a transmission line. A "discontinuity" in this case could be the end of the line (open circuit, short circuit, or terminated in a load), any tapping-off point, or any change in impedance.

The TDR works by analysing the length of time between sending out the signal and receiving it back, so it can tell you the physical distance between the instrument and the source of the echo. This can be done to a precision of centimeters.

Normal uses of TDRs

The main use of TDRs is to detect faults on cables or optical fibres.

Say that electric waves propagate at 0.66c (~200,000 km/sec) you have a 100 kilometre long wire, open circuit at the far end. If you send a pulse down one end of the wire, you would expect the echoes to bounce off the end of the wire and return in 1 millisecond (200km round trip distance.)

If you send a pulse down this 100km wire and the reflection comes back in 0.4 milliseconds, this tells you that there is a discontinuity 40% of the way down the wire (i.e. around the 40km mark.) Further analysis of the magnitude and shape of the echo can tell you what kind of discontinuity is present at that location, i.e. a complete break, a kink, corrosion, tapping-off point, splice, etc.

This is widely used in the electrical industry to locate faults on long cables. It's also used for the same purpose in telecommunications, to diagnose faults and (oddly enough) to locate surveillance wire taps.

Detecting illegal power line tap-offs

A power transmission line obeys the same physical principles as a telecommunications cable or an optical fibre, so in theory, TDR can be used to locate illegal tap-offs from a power line.

This idea isn't new or novel - there is at least one mob selling commercial products that detect illegal power line taps using this method. I note the Megger CFL510G instrument is a general purpose instrument intended for fault-finding on telecommunications equipment so it probably requires disconnection of the mains power before use.

To answer your original question, I would guess that using TDR to detect power theft on a large scale is technically possible but too expensive.

  • The distribution authority would have to send men around to every neighbourhood to perform periodic TDR testing. You have to pay their wages and equipment.
  • Depending on the particular instrument, using it might involve disconnecting the consumer's power. This would be both unpopular and expensive (the distribution company gets paid $$$ based on how many kilowatts you consume, and disconnected customers don't consume any kilowatts!)
  • The vast majority of people probably aren't stealing power, so you have to balance the cost of finding the power thieves vs. the cost of the electricity they are stealing.
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