Privacy-Preserving Market-Driven Transactive Energy System Using Homomorphic Encryption

Transactive energy paradigm targets creating a way for producers and consumers to match and balance energy supply and demand on a real time basis. An approach towards realizing this target is through price signals generated by energy market mechanisms. Pilot projects have confirmed that transactive control technology is effective in various ways, such as improving energy efficiency and reliability, reducing energy cost and encouraging integration of renewable energy sources. However, a main challenge towards the broad adoption of smart grid technologies, such as transactive energy, is the protection of the participants’ privacy. This paper presents the design and the implementation of a uniform price double auction mechanism which preserves the privacy of its participants leveraging homomorphic encryption. Market participants exchange encrypted information among them and the market entity. The auction clearing is jointly computed and the computations are performed on encrypted data. Large-scale experimentation, simulating the Olympic Peninsula pilot project, enable us to measure the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed distributed mechanism. The analysis of the results suggests that the proposed protocol provides an effective mechanism for the implementation of a privacy preserving real-time energy market.