Distributed Differentially Private Energy Management of Virtual Power Plants

Prosumers with flexible distributed energy resources (DERs) can be aggregated as a virtual power plant (VPP) to participate in the electricity market. However, the VPP’s energy management requires the prosumers to share individual data, which poses privacy concerns. This paper proposes a distributed differentially private energy management strategy for the VPP to maximize its profit by coordinating the prosumers and at the same time mitigate the privacy risks of local prosumers. Specifically, the coordination of prosumers is first formulated as an optimization problem, which includes the operation constraints of each individual prosumer and the VPP coordination process. On this basis, this paper proposes to solve the optimization problem with a two-level privacy protection strategy. For the individual level, a distributed solution framework is proposed to keep the private information of each prosumer preserved locally. For the communication level, a differential privacy mechanism is integrated into the information exchange process thus reducing the privacy leakage risk. Both theoretical and practical results are provided to verify the performance of the proposed method in terms of optimality and privacy protection levels.