Over the past several years, social scientists have had a field day studying the vast libraries of digital records that are produced as a happy byproduct of society's increased use of electronic systems. Anonymized cell phone records have given us new perspectives on human mobility. Logs from virtual worlds like Everquest and World of Warcraft have powered studies in fields from behavioral psychology to epidemiology. Today's issue of Science contains a stark warning that researchers could miss out on what may eventually be an even greater opportunity for access to this sort of data: the smart grid.

Combined, the US and Europe plan to install nearly 300 million smart grid devices within the next decade. Depending on the precise device used, these will monitor electricity use in homes and offices at time spans of considerably less than an hour and in some cases as short as every minute. The smartest of these devices can include data about specific appliances in use; by tracking things like current, phase, and frequency. Even the dumber ones can provide information about what's going on when it comes to power use.

That sort of data presents both an incredible opportunity and an incredible risk. It can provide a great perspective on what's going on in different areas of a nation or the world, and associate it with all sorts of interesting variables: economic activity, pandemic spread, the weather, etc. The risk is that, if the data isn't suitably anonymized, the breach of privacy could extend to private activities conducted in the privacy of a person's home.

The Science Policy Forum was penned by the founder of a public-interest consulting group. The author isn't so much concerned about the difficulty of crafting a policy for smart grid data sharing that protects privacy; these earlier studies, plus years of experience with handling patient records in medical studies, provides us with some excellent models of policies that have generally worked. The problem is that smart grid policies are being crafted right now by organizations like the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the research community seems not to be paying attention.

The article points out a number of reasons to think that, without some sort of input from the research community, utilities won't necessarily be interested in preserving or sharing smart grid data. To begin with, from a utility's perspective, these are simply a modernized form of consumption records, and most of them traditionally purge those records after a period of seven years.

Although the companies that provide electricity to end users have a long history of working with the Department of Energy, they don't have much experience with working with the sociologists and epidemiologists that might be interested in working with smart grid data. It seems likely that these research communities will differ from the DOE in a variety of ways, and there might be some serious cultural misunderstandings.

Finally, the article raises the prospect that grid providers might not want some research to be done. There's been a lingering fear among the public over potential health impacts of electromagnetic fields, and the utilities are unlikely to want to encourage anyone to perform research that focuses the public's attention on this.

Still, the author points out that both the utilities and the DOE can greatly benefit from some of the research derived from studying smart grid data. The questions suggested include, "Are there ways to spot impending electricity outages? How does energy usage correlate with current events, appliance standards, and price? Which utility programs work best to improve energy efficiency? How are appliance efficiencies changing over time? How varied is the usage of appliances from person to person, from region to region, and from decade to decade?"

In the absence of participation from the research community, the author argues, there's a good chance that any rules regarding access to smart grid data will freeze them out entirely, end up being modified in a haphazard manner, or only open up the data after some of it is lost for good. And that means everyone—the utilities, the DOE, and the researchers—will lose out on a unique opportunity.

Science, 2010. DOI: 10.1126/science.1189229 (About DOIs).