Enhanced Privacy-Preservation in Smart Grid Power Charging Coordination

With the significant growth in the industry of energy storage units (ESUs) and plug-in electric vehicles, charging coordination becomes critical to avoid electric grid overload. However, without effective methods to secure the charging requests, malicious users can eavesdrop on the communication between the ESUs and the grid to extract sensitive users’ information. Therefore, privacy preservation is a must in the design of charging coordination schemes. To address this critical issue, in this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving charging coordination scheme that allows the aggregator to allocate optimized amounts of charging power to all available ESUs in the community without knowing their individual charging requests details. In particular, based on aggregated secret key communication, best-effort, and cooperative power allocation schemes, the proposed coordination scheme totally hides the sensitive data from all the nodes in the network and performs the power allocation in a semi-blind fashion. Using extensive simulations, we show that our proposed scheme can achieve almost the same performance as that of charging coordination schemes in the literature based on full knowledge of the charging requests while outperforming them by an enhanced level of security. In particular, numerical results confirm that the proposed scheme can allocate 95% of what traditional schemes allocate while keeping ESU information private. Despite the anonymity and collaborative nature of the algorithm, the average convergence time is around 2.7 iterations, with 50% to 100% of cases converging in one iteration.