Smart metering and data privacy issues

Growing energy consumption enforces initiatives that look for alternatives aimed at better energy management and load balancing. Smart metering is a topic that meets these expectations and it seems to provide a value added for both, suppliers and customers. In this paper we focus on different issues of data and privacy protection for smart grids. In particular, we discuss security concerns related to system architecture, possible means of data protection and demonstrate the main research challenges in privacy assurance for smart grids.