Aggregating Privacy-Conscious Distributed Energy Resources for Grid Service Provision

TL;DR

This paper presents an online distributed algorithm that aggregates privacy-conscious residential energy resources to support grid services, balancing efficiency, privacy, and communication constraints.

Contribution

It introduces a novel distributed method that preserves consumer privacy while effectively aggregating DERs for grid services, without high-bandwidth communication.

Findings

Distributed algorithm converges near the optimal centralized solution

Method preserves consumer privacy effectively

Operates without high-bandwidth two-way communication

Abstract

The increasing adoption of advanced metering infrastructure has led to growing concerns regarding privacy risks stemming from the high resolution measurements. This has given rise to privacy protection techniques that physically alter the consumer's energy load profile, masking private information by using localised devices, e.g. batteries or flexible loads. Meanwhile, there has also been increasing interest in aggregating the distributed energy resources (DERs) of residential consumers to provide services to the grid. In this paper, we propose an online distributed algorithm to aggregate the DERs of privacy-conscious consumers to provide services to the grid, whilst preserving their privacy. Results show that the optimisation solution from the distributed method converges to one close to the optimum computed using an ideal centralised solution method, balancing between grid service provision, consumer preferences and privacy protection. More importantly, the distributed method preserves consumer privacy, and does not require high-bandwidth two-way communications infrastructure.