Privacy in the Smart Grid: Information, Control, and Games

The deployment of advanced cyber infrastructure in the electricity grid, leading to the so-called smart grid, introduces concerns about the privacy of the parties interconnected by the grid. In this chapter, the roles of information, control, and game theories in quantifying and exploring such privacy issues are examined, primarily in the context of smart grid communications. Absolute privacy is generally not desirable in such applications, but rather the tradeoff between the privacy of data and its usefulness, or utility, is of concern. An information theoretic setting is used to characterize the optimal such tradeoff in a general context, and this setting is then applied to two problems arising in smart grid: smart meter privacy, in which control theory also plays a role when storage is introduced into the system; and competitive privacy, in which each of a group of multiple grid actors seeks to optimize its individual privacy–utility tradeoff while interacting with the other actors in information exchange, a setting that can be examined using game theory.