Privacy-friendly appliance load scheduling in smart grids

Abstract

The massive integration of renewable energy sources into the power grid ecosystem with the aim of reducing carbon emissions must cope with their intrinsically intermittent and unpredictable nature. Therefore, the grid must improve its capability of controlling the energy demand by adapting the power consumption curve to match the trend of green energy generation. This could be done by scheduling the activities of deferrable electrical appliances. However, communicating the users' needs about the usage of the electrical appliances leaks sensitive information about habits and lifestyles of the customers, thus arising privacy concerns. This paper proposes a privacy-preserving framework to allow the coordination of energy consumption without compromising the privacy of the users: the service requests generated by the domestic appliances are diveded in crypto-shares using Shamir Secret Sharing scheme and collected through an anonymous routing protocol based on Crowds by a set of schedulers, which schedule the requests operating directly on the shares. We discuss the security guarantees provided by our proposed infrastructure and evaluate its performance, comparing it with the optimal scheduling obtained through an Integer Linear Programming formulation.