# Differential Privacy for Power Grid Obfuscation

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel differential privacy mechanism for power grid data that ensures AC-feasibility and maintains network fidelity, enhancing privacy without compromising operational integrity.

## Contribution

It proposes a new DP method tailored for power networks that guarantees AC-feasibility and preserves data utility, addressing limitations of existing mechanisms.

## Key findings

- Obfuscation reduces attacker exploitation risk.
- The method maintains network operational feasibility.
- Experimental results confirm high data utility.

## Abstract

The availability of high-fidelity energy networks brings significant value to academic and commercial research. However, such releases also raise fundamental concerns related to privacy and security as they can reveal sensitive commercial information and expose system vulnerabilities. This paper investigates how to release power networks where the parameters of transmission lines and transformers are obfuscated. It does so by using the framework of Differential Privacy (DP), that provides strong privacy guarantees and has attracted significant attention in recent years. Unfortunately, simple DP mechanisms often result in AC-infeasible networks. To address these concerns, this paper presents a novel differential privacy mechanism that guarantees AC-feasibility and largely preserves the fidelity of the obfuscated network. Experimental results also show that the obfuscation significantly reduces the potential damage of an attacker exploiting the release of the dataset.