Digital Energy Platforms Considering Digital Privacy and Security by Design Principles

Abstract

The power system and markets have become increasingly complex, along with efforts to digitalize the energy sector. Accessing flexibility services, in particular, through digital energy platforms, has enabled communication between multiple entities within the energy system and streamlined flexibility market operations. However, digitalizing these vast and complex systems introduces new cybersecurity and privacy concerns, which must be properly addressed during the design of the digital energy platform ecosystems. More specifically, both privacy and cybersecurity measures should be embedded into all phases of the platform design and operation, based on the privacy and security by design principles. In this study, these principles are used to propose a holistic but generic architecture for digital energy platforms that are able to facilitate multiple use cases for flexibility services in the energy sector. A hybrid framework using both DLT and non-DLT solutions ensures trust throughout the layers of the platform architecture. Furthermore, an evaluation of numerous energy flexibility service use cases operating at various stages of the energy value chain is shown and graded in terms of digital energy platform technical maturity, privacy, and cybersecurity issues.