Dipayan Ghosh

I am working on an economic analysis of the implementation of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), a novel smart metering technology. In short, AMI enables demand response (DR), which reduces energy production costs. To bill consumers properly, however, temporally precise consumption data needs to be collected from participating households. This presents a privacy concern, as it has been established that a third party that has access to precise consumption data can predict the exact actions of the consumer easily.

To address this privacy issue, I am analyzing the economic incentives related to AMI implementation from the perspectives of the representative consumer and the utility company using a game theoretic framework. The goal of this work is to determine the regulatory measures that should be taken in order to push the power industry to choose full AMI implementation and DR participation.

I am also studying the economic impact of using an alternative auction mechanism in deregulated electricity markets. While the mechanism that's presently used in the industry minimizes total bid costs, the alternative scheme that we studied directly minimizes total final consumer payments directly. I conduct game theoretic and agent-based simulations using the auction mechanisms and have found that in both short and long term simulations, the proposed alternative mechanism provides lower consumer payments.