Generative AI Enabled Secure Communication in Smart Grid: Challenges and Solutions

Generative AI has recently emerged as a promising solution to address critical challenges in smart grid communication, including security, privacy, and efficiency. In this paper, we first introduce some concepts of smart grid and generative AI, outline their current state, and discuss the potential applications of integrating generative AI into smart grid. Then, we examine traditional and non-generative AI solutions, highlighting their limitations. Subsequently, we propose a promising solution by integrating generative AI into the smart grid to develop a generative AI-based agent, aiming to enhance the security and efficiency of smart grid communication while addressing privacy concerns. Additionally, we provide an experimental evaluation to demonstrate how the proposed solution can be applied to optimize smart grid holistically. Experimental results clearly show that the proposed generative AI agent approach can protect user privacy and significantly improve the overall efficiency and security of smart grid communication. Furthermore, we highlight future research directions for generative AI in smart grid applications, including the synergistic role of generative AI in smart grids, cross-domain applications and extensions, and quantum security of smart grids.