Privacy and Auditability in the Local Energy Market of an Energy Community with Homomorphic Encryption

The world of electrical distribution is rapidly changing and is seeing more and more distributed production and steerable flexibilities. Energy communities are seen as an important innovation for the optimization of electrical consumption at a local level. A central need of the local energy markets inside energy communities is the exchange and circulation of production and consumption data, and therefore the problem of the potential leak of sensitive data must be addressed. In this paper, the context of the Lugaggia Innovation Community, a Self Consumption Community pilot project in southern Switzerland, is introduced together with the blockchain framework that was created for its internal market interaction and the rules designed for its local energy market. A cryptographic protocol from the literature, based on homomorphic encryption, is then proposed for the anonymous aggregation of production and consumption data of the individual households at a resolution of 15 min. The computational overhead associated with the protocol is then experimented and analyzed.

Automated summary

This paper introduces the context of the Lugaggia Innovation Community, a Self Consumption Community pilot project in southern Switzerland, and the blockchain framework created for its internal market interaction. It addresses the problem of potential sensitive data leakage in the local energy market and proposes a cryptographic protocol based on homomorphic encryption for anonymous data aggregation.