Energy Use Data Model

Energy Use Data Model (EUDM)

Funded by Department of Energy
Partners: Energy BU
Duration: 2015 – 2022

The Energy-Use Data Model (EUDM) aims to provide fine-grained, energy-use data through a central online platform as a data service. The data will be collected directly from energy users: potentially a survey data containing socio-demographic information of energy consumers will be linked with the historical energy consumption data outsourced from a third party. Sharing this dataset with the public will require addressing a range of privacy and confidentiality concerns. In this report, we gather the requirements for privacy and confidentiality protection, review the available range of protection measures, and make recommendations for a suitable privacy and confidentiality framework for EUDM.

This project focuses on developing approaches to protect privacy and confidentiality in data collected from energy consumers (for example, households as residential consumers, and businesses as commercial and industrial consumers). Although up-to-date technology for information security is essential for privacy protection, it is insufficient for protection of personal privacy and confidentiality. We aim to examine the feasibility of existing confidentiality protection measures, and to adapt the most useful methods to deal with EUDM’s data confidentiality when it is shared with the public, energy data researchers and consultants.