Smart metering solutions have gained much acceptance in many countries as a way to automate billing, provide better understanding of electricity usage, and to support more advanced energy analytics services. Member States of the European Union have committed to rolling out close to 200 million smart electricity meters. Data from smart meters support prosumers offering electricity to the grid from local generation and assists consumers in decoding their energy usage. Advanced energy analytics services provide prediction and forecasting, load monitoring, and outlier/fraud detection based on smart meter data offered from centralized data repositories. However, this development has raised serious privacy concerns and has created an urgent need for innovative privacy-preserving technologies to protect the interests of the data owners.

Homomorphic encryption is a promising technology to offer data confidentiality that can be used to preserve privacy when data storage and computation are outsourced to untrusted third parties such as commercial cloud providers and even energy utilities. Another promising technology is blockchain as this has the potential of creating trust in networks of untrusted peers.

The talk introduces smart meter data analytics and describes how homomorphic encryption can be used to offer confidentiality in a privacy-preserving manner. Furthermore, the talk addresses permissioned blockchain technology and explains how access to data can be controlled by the data owner without the need of a trusted centralized entity. The talk concludes by proposing a future privacy-preserving smart meter data framework to support advanced energy analytics services.