Innovative Strategy for the Socioeconomic Variables Impact Evaluation on Non-Technical Losses

Non-technical losses (NTL) comprise one of the primary sources of negative impacts on the technical and economic efficiency of the distribution sector. Since it has an exogenous source, NTL pattern identification provides tools to determine points for inspection and to understand the main reasons and how to mitigate future energy theft and connection fraud. In previous studies, the relationship between NTL in low-voltage consumer environments and socioeconomic aspects is clear. However, these relations cannot be directly obtained due to the different data sources and the lack of accurate measures and information on distribution systems. This paper presents an innovative NTL spatial analysis data treatment strategy based on these premises. Layers of georeferenced socioeconomic sectors and distribution systems are crossed for feeder vertexes, consumer units, and energy consumption estimation. These three variables compose an NTL contribution index to allocate the global estimated NTL along different socioeconomic sectors. It was applied in a Brazilian case study, comparing different scenarios. The results showed a general advance in feature selection, increasing the Mutual Information and Spearman Correlation indexes.