Battery-Induced Load Hiding and Its Utility Consequences

The introduction of smart grids allows utility providers to collect detailed data about consumers, which can be utilized to enhance grid efficiency and reliability. However, this data collection also raises privacy concerns. To protect user privacy, some studies suggest using battery-based load hiding. Nevertheless, the impact of widespread adoption of this approach on utility providers remain unclear. Our paper seeks to evaluate the effects of battery-based load hiding on two critical operations: user profiling and anomaly detection. Our findings reveal that the inclusion of battery users in datasets can diminish the quality of conclusions drawn from these data. This can result in a decrease in the Area Under the Curve (AUC) by more than 10% when attempting to profile users within single-occupant and multiple-occupant households. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate that battery-based load hiding not only conceals information about users employing the batteries but can also lead to an increased rate of false positives for other non-battery users (from 0.15 to 0.37) within the system. To mitigate these adverse effects, our study assessed various mitigation strategies. In the context of user profiling, our experiment demonstrated that identifying and removing battery users from the analytical dataset using unsupervised detection methods can effectively lessen the impact of battery users. For anomaly detection, our experiment revealed that creating separate classification models for battery and non-battery users can significantly reduce the adverse influence of battery users on the detection performance.