Disaggregation for Networked Power Systems

Abstract

Electricity data such as supply, demand, prices, and line flows, are sensitive. Utility companies, understandably do not want to, in fact often cannot, make this data publicly available. However, such data is critical in many fundamental areas in power systems research. As a compromise, aggregated data sets are sometimes made available. In such a setting it may be the case that data is aggregated over a geographical region and time. This forces researchers to try and “invert” the data to obtain dis aggregated data sets. In this paper we rigorously formulate the disaggregation problem for networked power systems and present two algorithms that provide solutions to the DC version of the problem. We show that it is possible to invert the data, but that does not imply that ground truth solutions are obtained, thus the utility companies maintain a notion of privacy. The aim of this paper is to highlight the potential benefits to both the research community and utility companies of releasing aggregated data.