Degrees of Freedom in Information Sharing on a Greener and Smarter Grid

Providing warmth, food, housing, and other necessities of life require the use of energy, which causes it to play a pivotal role in society. Changes in the production, distribution and consumption of energy (carriers) impact everyone. Next to well known (expected) changes in the area of renewable energy sources, we foresee the possibility of major changes in the way society shares information about production, distribution and consumption of energy (carriers). This is caused by the expected societal benefits of exchanging more information between parties connected on the energy grid: more efficiency though balancing of supply and demand, which in turn makes energy less scarce and avoids unnecessary 'heat pollution'. However, the sharing of information could introduce imbalances in 'societal' power between governments, companies and consumers. We argue that all parties involved should consciously decide - on a well informed basis - on what information they want to share. In this paper, we provide an overview of the degrees of freedom in information sharing on the green & smart energy grid of tomorrow.