Competitive privacy in the smart grid

The requirement of wide-area monitoring in the deregulated electric grid is driving the need for distributed state estimation. This leads to a novel problem of competitive privacy amongst energy providers (operators) that captures the conflict between the need for collaboration to estimate the global system state with high fidelity (utility) and the need to withhold data (privacy) for competitive reasons. The precise tradeoff between utility and privacy is made explicit using rate distortion theory with privacy constraints for a two-operator network. Practical approaches are briefly discussed.