Worried about privacy? Let your PV converter cover your electricity consumption fingerprints

Solar power has emerged as one of the three most widely installed renewable energy sources around the globe. Photovoltaic (PV) capacity in excess of 150 GW had been installed in 2013 already, and many more installations are connected to worldwide power grids every day; especially in the form of small-scale PV plants in domestic environments. However, in order to connect PV installations to the power grid, their dc output must be converted to the nominal mains voltage and frequency through the use of converters. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to influence the maximum power point tracking (MPPT) component of such a PV converter in order to enable two main privacy-preserving operations: Firstly, by deliberately reducing the output power through changing the converter´s operating point, appliance operations can be emulated in order to pretend user presence during periods of absence. Secondly, by running the converter below optimum output power, and feeding real-time data of an appliance consumption to the device, it is able to hide the appliance´s operation from the household´s aggregate consumption. We present simulations results that prove how our modified converter design can hide appliance load signatures as well as how it can be used to emulate appliance signatures to falsely indicate user presence.