Aggregating Privacy-Conscious Distributed Energy Resources for Grid Service Provision

With the increasing adoption of advanced metering infrastructure, there are growing concerns with regards to privacy risks stemming from the high resolution measurements. This has given rise to consumer privacy protection techniques that physically alter the consumer's energy load profile in order to mask private information using localised devices such as batteries or flexible loads. Meanwhile, there has also been increasing interest in aggregating the distributed energy resources (DERs) of residential consumers in order to provide services to the grid. In this paper, we propose a distributed algorithm to aggregate the DERs of privacy-conscious consumers to provide services to the grid, whilst preserving the consumers' privacy. Results show that the optimisation solution from the distributed method converges to one close to the optimum computed using an ideal centralised solution method, balancing between grid service provision, consumer preferences and privacy protection. While the overall performance of the distributed method lags that of a centralised solution, it preserves the privacy of consumers, and does not require high-bandwidth two-way communications infrastructure.