Differentially Private Load Restoration for Microgrids with Distributed Energy Storage

TL;DR

This paper introduces a differentially-private method for load restoration in microgrids with distributed energy storage, ensuring privacy of ESS modes during optimal power flow calculations.

Contribution

It develops a novel differentially-private mechanism for load restoration in microgrids that protects the private operating modes of distributed energy storage systems.

Findings

Successfully applied to a 33-bus microgrid example.

Maintains load restoration performance while preserving privacy.

Demonstrates feasibility of privacy-preserving optimal power flow.

Abstract

Distributed energy storage systems (ESSs) can be efficiently leveraged for load restoration (LR) for a microgrid (MG) in island mode. When the ESSs are owned by third parties rather than the MG operator (MGO), the ESS operating setpoints may be considered as private information of their respective owners. Therefore, efforts must be put forth to avoid the disclosure through adversarial analysis of load setpoints. In his paper, we consider a scenario where LR takes place in a MG by determining load and ESS power injections through the solution of an AC optimal power flow (AC-OPF) problem. Since the charge/discharge mode at any given time is assumed to be private, we develop a differentially-private mechanism which restores load while maintaining privacy of ESS mode data. The performance of the proposed mechanism is demonstrated for a 33-bus MG.