Privacy Aware Demand Response and Smart Metering

Smart meters are a crucial part of the smart grid, yet they arise several privacy concerns. The fine-grained consumption readings, can expose information about the household such as types of devices inside the house. In this paper we introduce two methods which enable a household to hide private issues. The first method, which is called One Level Consumption (OLC), tries to exploit demand response components such as battery, elastic load and distributed generators to maintain a constant consumption throughout the whole day. The second method, which is called Maximum Difference (MD), obfuscates the smart meter readings before sending them to the utility company. Nevertheless, the transmitted values are valid for billing. Taking Electric Vehicle (EV) charging signal as an example, we have shown that it is possible to hide most charging signals.