Transportation and Power Grid in Smart Cities

20 Protecting the Privacy of Electricity Consumers in the Smart City

Binod Vaidya¹ and Hussein T. Mouftah¹

¹School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada

20.1 Introduction

An intelligent energy infrastructure, which links together various elements of city operations, would be one of the essential features in a smart city.

A smart grid is an electric power grid that employs information and communication technologies (ICTs) to improve its efficiency, reliability, resiliency, and flexibility. Such an electric grid not only provides information about its energy usage and costs to consumers such that they can make decisions independently but also transforms electric power grid through remote monitoring and control, automation, self‐healing approach as well as provides safe and reliable integration of distributed renewable energy resources (Strasser et al., 2015).

Smart meters are one of the key enablers of smart grids. An advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) allows bidirectional energy flows as well as utilizes two‐way communication enabling energy service providers (ESPs) to receive energy consumption data of consumers and sends pricing or control signals back to consumers in real time. By measuring consumers' near real‐time energy consumption data at high temporal resolution, AMI enables ESPs to control and optimize the supply and distribution and even offer their customers pricing schemes based on current ...