Customer-centric energy usage data management and sharing in smart grid systems

Abstract

A recent study revealed that fine-grained energy usage data could potentially leak sensitive information about an electricity customer. On the other hand, a number of online service providers utilizing such data have emerged and improved effectiveness of smart grid technologies (for instance, demand-response aggregators), and therefore sharing of data is getting popular. In this work, we propose a customer-centric framework to manage, store, and share energy usage data in a privacy-enhanced way. We present a mechanism to enable customers to flexibly control the amount of energy usage information disclosed while still allowing third-party service providers to be convinced of the authenticity of data. A prototype implementation using the widely used Green Button data model is presented and evaluated. We further discuss the design of a demand-response aggregation service on top of the proposed framework.