PrivGrid: Privacy-Preserving Individual Load Forecasting Service for Smart Grid

Smart meter-based individual load forecasts are more and more widely deployed to serve smart grid and home energy management. Customary load forecasting systems collect a massive amount of fine-grained electrical data from people’s smart meters in plaintext, inevitably raising privacy concerns and even anti-smart-meter initiatives. Current privacy solutions either compromise accuracy and efficacy or require the redeployment of trusted infrastructure. In this paper, we present PrivGrid, the first systematic solution for smart grids that collects, clusters, trains, and forecasts customers’ load data in a privacy-preserving way. Moreover, we highlight the technical contribution of our building block: a novel and fast arithmetic multiplication triple via secure inner product protocol outperforms the existing methods and may be included in other privacy computing modules. Then, we develop efficient secure protocols to enable the arithmetic operations of individual load forecasting in a server-aided model and utilize the best alternatives to nonlinear functions. Besides, aggregating all of our individual forecasts can produce a more accurate estimate of the system-level load than the typical aggregate technique. We rigorously prove that the servers cannot obtain the user’s historical load data and short-term load forecast values while providing services. PrivGrid is also tested on real residential smart meter data to show its efficiency, and the relevant code has been made available to the community for further research.