Data handling in the smart grid: do we know enough?

Abstract

Data privacy in the smart grid is an important requirement for consumers. Central to the data privacy issue is the handling of energy-usage data, in particular data retention, aggregation, and anonymization. Government and industry groups have formulated various policies in this area, mostly based on the Fair Information Practice principles.

In this position paper, we argue that the existing policy-level work is insufficient – scientific work is needed to fully implement such policies. We propose here a research agenda to appropriately balance the advantages of fine-grained energy usage data with the associated privacy risks. For comparison, we also describe analogous policies, and their implementation, in areas such as telecommunications data, Internet web behavior, and medical data.