Privacy Preservation in Smart Grid Environment

Smart grids are conceived to ensure smarter generation, transmission, distribution, and consumption of electricity. It integrates the traditional electricity grid with information and communication technology. This enables a two-way communication among the smart grid entities, which translates to exchange of information about fine-grained user energy consumption between the smart grid entities. However, the flow of user energy consumption data may lead to the violation of user privacy. Inference on such data can expose the daily habits and types of appliances of users. Thus, several privacy preservation schemes have been proposed in the literature to ensure the privacy and security requirements of smart grid users. This chapter provides a review of some privacy preservation schemes. The schemes operational procedure, strengths, and weaknesses are discussed. A taxonomy, comparison table, and comparative analysis are also presented. The comparative analysis gives an insight on open research issues in privacy preservation schemes.