Privacy and the Power Grid

Grid Week 2009 comes to Washington, DC this week and this year’s gathering features some of America’s top policymakers: Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke and Aneesh Chopra, the Obama Administration’s CTO. In the coming years, these officials and their departments will make critical decisions about the future of smart grid technology.

We firmly believe in the potential benefits of enabling our electric power system to become “smart”. More efficient management of the power supply could bring down consumption, enable green technologies and help consumers save money. The many ways in which data about consumer demand will be used for smarter electricity provision have the potential to revolutionize the electricity industry and to benefit society. However, this very same information about consumers will create major concerns if consumer-focused principles of transparency and control are not treated as essential design principles from start to end of the standards development process. Principles of privacy by design must be part of the overall design for smart grid data flows.

We are pleased to announce that we have signed an agreement with the Gridwise Alliance (sponsors of Gridweek) to collaborate on projects involving data privacy and the smart grid.

We have also begun “construction” of *SmartGridPrivacy.org* (expired), a site that we hope will serve as a clearinghouse for information about the Smart Grid and privacy issues. And we are planning a conference that will be devoted to privacy issues related to the smart grid.

Contact Matthew Gruenberg, FPF smart grid policy fellow, at

[email protected] to get involved with any of our smart grid privacy efforts.