The massive integration of renewable energy sources in the power grid ecosystem
with the aim of reducing carbon emissions must cope with their intrinsically
intermittent and unpredictable nature. Therefore, the grid must improve its
capability of controlling the energy demand by adapting the power consumption
curve to match the trend of green energy generation. This could be done by
scheduling the activities of deferrable and/or interruptible electrical appliances.
However, communicating the users' needs about the usage of their appliances
also leaks sensitive information about their habits and lifestyles, thus arising
privacy concerns.
This paper proposes a framework to allow the coordination of energy consumption
without compromising the privacy of the users: the service requests
generated by the domestic appliances are divided into crypto-shares using Shamir
Secret Sharing scheme and collected through an anonymous routing protocol by
a set of schedulers, which schedule the requests by directly operating on the
shares. We discuss the security guarantees provided by our proposed infrastructure
and evaluate its performance, comparing it with the optimal scheduling
obtained by means of an Integer Linear Programming formulation