Increasing Smart Meter Privacy Through Energy Harvesting and Storage Devices

TL;DR

This paper investigates how energy harvesting and storage devices can enhance privacy in smart meters by analyzing the trade-offs between information leakage and energy efficiency, providing insights into optimal system design.

Contribution

It introduces an information theoretic framework to quantify privacy gains from energy harvesting and storage in smart meters, highlighting the trade-offs involved.

Findings

Energy harvesting diversifies energy sources, increasing privacy.

Storage devices improve both energy efficiency and privacy.

Trade-off exists between privacy (information leakage) and energy wastage).

Abstract

Smart meters are key elements for the operation of smart grids. By providing near realtime information on the energy consumption of individual users, smart meters increase the efficiency in generation, distribution and storage of energy in a smart grid. The ability of the utility provider to track users energy consumption inevitably leads to important threats to privacy. In this paper, privacy in a smart metering system is studied from an information theoretic perspective in the presence of energy harvesting and storage units. It is shown that energy harvesting provides increased privacy by diversifying the energy source, while a storage device can be used to increase both the energy efficiency and the privacy of the user. For given input load and energy harvesting rates, it is shown that there exists a trade-off between the information leakage rate, which is used to measure the privacy of the user, and the wasted energy rate, which is a measure of the energy-efficiency. The impact of the energy harvesting rate and the size of the storage device on this trade-off is also studied.