Smart meter data: Balancing consumer privacy concerns with legitimate applications

By E. McKenna, Ian Richardson, M. Thomson. 2012

375 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Smart meters are being rolled out in large numbers throughout the world, with proponents claiming they are a critical step in the transition to a low-carbon economy. Yet there are significant unresolved negative reactions to smart meters, principally based on the concern that smart meters might be used to infer the private activities that occur within a dwelling. Though smart meter data is classified as personal data, and as such protected under existing data protection frameworks in the EU, there are relevant exceptions, notably where the data is required for legitimate applications associated with the performance of 'regulated duties'. This paper contributes to this debate by examining the data requirements for some of the proposed applications of smart meter data within the electricity supply industry, and investigates whether the use of personal data can be minimized or even avoided. The discussion includes system balancing, demand reduction, demand response and distribution network operation and planning, and indicates that, for most of these applications, the requirements for personal data can indeed be minimized. 'Privacy friendly' alternatives are discussed.

Subfields: Control and Systems Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5fe36aca73678e2c5790bab2d2e36185b36cc2cb

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In Control and Systems Engineering

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Social implications of residential demand response in cool temperate climates (2012, background): “Moreover, solar PV, heat pumps and electric vehicles are likely to be concentrated geographically, leading to local network management difficulties (McKenna et al., 2012). theory, unpredictable, and follow some of the volatility of wholesale electricity prices.”
A Comprehensive Study of Security of Internet-of-Things (2017, background): “In recent years, a few research efforts have attempted to shed light on unexpected uses of different types of environment-/ user-related data collected by Internet-connected sensors [156]–[159].”
Review and classification of barriers and enablers of demand response in the smart grid (2017, background): “Even with aggregation of DR resources [74], the number of DR agents may cause significant complexity in operation of Smart Grid/DR markets, especially if those DR agents wish to restrict the amount of information they reveal [43].”
Local Energy Markets: Paving the Path Toward Fully Transactive Energy Systems (2019, background): “Another solution is to handle technical constraints with active control to manage local resources, storage systems and demand response (DR) programs [3], however, this may raise privacy concerns [4].”
Prosumer Communities and Relationships in Smart Grids: A Literature Review, Evolution and Future Directions (2018, background): “Analysis revealed that majority of the literature addresses costs issues [96–98], cyber security [76,99,100], regulatory aspects [97,101,102], customer privacy [3,103,104], and consumers’ perception [105–107].”
Revealing Household Characteristics from Smart Meter Data (2014, background): “a discussion with those who capture and want to use the data, urging them to make techniques for privacy protection an inherent feature of the emerging smart metering infrastructure [48].”
Harnessing social innovation for energy justice: a business model perspective (2017, background): “But does such a remark hold true today? Is business incompatible with social justice? To be sure, the generation and supply of energy has become veiled in complexity, technocratic language and piecemeal economic regulation (Kuzemko, 2016), while energy usage is often concealed by concerns of househo”