Enhanced smart meter privacy protection using rechargeable batteries

Due to the rapid growth of smart grids, use of smart meters (SMs) have increased in the recent days. The main problem with the use of SMs is that by observing the SMs reading, it is possible to infer the daily activities of the consumers. Therefore, protection of privacy is a major concern related to SMs. Using rechargeable batteries (RBs) is a popular method in protecting the privacy in SMs as these methods do not tamper with SM readings. The major problem in RB-based mechanism is that the energy management unit (EMU) cannot protect privacy, if the demand is lower or higher for a longer period. To overcome this problem, in this paper a heuristic method has been proposed by considering time varying target output load based on the three major properties of artificial fish swarm optimization algorithm. For the optimal choice of the time varying target output load, RB constraints as well as reduction of the average cost of energy have been considered in our proposed method. We have proposed two privacy preserving mechanisms for both offline and online scenarios. The proposed method preserves privacy while reducing the cost of energy. Simulation results show that the proposed method is able to provide privacy by overcoming the problem identified in the existing methods.