Smart Grid Challenges through the Lens of the European General Data Protection Regulation

The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was conceived to protect the privacy of individual citizens and manage the movement of personal data. The Smart Grid has the same needs as any privacy-critical system and, compared to the engineering of other architectures, has the peculiarity of being the source of the energy consumption data, which is an indirect means to infer other personal information with potential professional or commercial value. This work looks at the Smart Grid from the perspective of the GDPR, which is especially relevant now given the current growth and diversification of the Smart Grid ecosystem. We contribute a review of existing works showing the importance of energy consumption as valuable personal data, an analysis of the established Smart Grid Architecture Model regarding GDPR compliance, and a list of technical and legal challenges where we can highlight the challenge of managing the data processing by third parties