On Homomorphic Encryption for privacy-preserving distributed load adaption in smart grids

The smart power grid integrates communication technology and intelligent power management to balance power generation and consumption. New stakeholders, e.g. households or prosumers, are connected to the smart grid and participate in e.g. Demand Response (DR). An important factor in this new environment is privacy. In this paper we present a Homomorphic Encryption Scheme (HES) for Distributed Load Adaption (DLA). The HES utilises the Paillier cryptosystem to gather aggregated data and perform DLA based on the max-min fairness principle. The effects on communication are analysed. Evaluation and simulation results show, that the privacy of users is secured. The communicational and computational overhead has a complexity of O(H · log (H)) for H households, which is in acceptable margins, compared to other approaches.