Load Hiding of Household's Power Demand

TL;DR

This paper compares battery-based and appliance-based load hiding techniques to enhance household privacy in smart metering, demonstrating that both methods improve privacy, with load-based load hiding additionally protecting appliance-level data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel load-based load hiding technique and compares it with the existing battery-based method using real household data.

Findings

Both techniques improve household privacy.

Load-based load hiding enhances appliance-level privacy.

Battery-based load hiding effectively disguises overall power demand.

Abstract

With the development and introduction of smart metering, the energy information for costumers will change from infrequent manual meter readings to fine-grained energy consumption data. On the one hand these fine-grained measurements will lead to an improvement in costumers' energy habits, but on the other hand the fined-grained data produces information about a household and also households' inhabitants, which are the basis for many future privacy issues. To ensure household privacy and smart meter information owned by the household inhabitants, load hiding techniques were introduced to obfuscate the load demand visible at the household energy meter. In this work, a state-of-the-art battery-based load hiding (BLH) technique, which uses a controllable battery to disguise the power consumption and a novel load hiding technique called load-based load hiding (LLH) are presented. An LLH system uses an controllable household appliance to obfuscate the household's power demand. We evaluate and compare both load hiding techniques on real household data and show that both techniques can strengthen household privacy but only LLH can increase appliance level privacy.