Privacy Protection via Joint Real and Reactive Load Shaping in Smart Grids

TL;DR

This paper proposes a joint load shaping approach for smart grids that considers both real and reactive power to enhance consumer privacy, demonstrating significant improvements over methods focusing on only one power component.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-objective optimization framework for joint real and reactive load shaping to maximize privacy while minimizing user costs and discomfort, a novel approach in demand response schemes.

Findings

Joint shaping of real and reactive power doubles privacy levels.

Ignoring reactive power leads to sub-optimal privacy preservation.

The proposed method effectively balances privacy, cost, and discomfort.

Abstract

Frequent metering of electricity consumption is crucial for demand side management in smart grids. However, metered data can be processed fairly easily by employing well-established nonintrusive appliance load monitoring techniques to infer appliance usage, which reveals information about consumers' private lives. Existing load shaping techniques for privacy primarily focus only on altering metered real power, whereas smart meters collect reactive power consumption data as well for various purposes. This study addresses consumer privacy preservation via load shaping in a demand response scheme, considering both real and reactive power. We build a multi-objective optimization framework that enables us to characterize the interplay between privacy maximization, user cost minimization, and user discomfort minimization objectives. Our results reveal that minimizing information leakage due to a single component, e.g., real power, would suffer from overlooking information leakage due to the other component, e.g., reactive power, causing sub-optimal decisions. In fact, joint shaping of real and reactive power components results in the best possible privacy preservation performance, which leads to more than a twofold increase in privacy in terms of mutual information.