Designing and implementing the trust diamond for verifiable and privacy-preserving data sharing: engineering energy flexibility provision

While data sharing in a digitalized world is increasingly important, its inherent tension between data verifiability and privacy limits stakeholders’ engagement. In the course of the sustainable energy transition, this tension also hinders the integration of small-scale flexibility devices in electricity grids: Grid operators must rely on verifiable data for secure operations, while device owners often seek to ensure data protection and thus privacy. Applying an Action Design Research Approach, we design and implement the Flexibility Provision Data Flow and the digital Trust Diamond that leverages wallet-based identity management for ensuring verifiability and privacy-preserving data sharing. To that end, we also derive two fundamental design principles for systems that leverage the Trust Diamond, namely Verifiability through Delegation and Mediated Sovereignty, and show their applicability for optimized grid operations. Our research further results in proposing a Decentralized Flexibility Provision Architecture that operationalizes these findings in a laboratory and field test environment. Performance tests indicate the solution’s practical scalability. This study highlights the importance of Information Systems-based solutions to enhance data sharing and address trust concerns between stakeholders. Moreover, it provides an actionable design to realize wallet-based data sharing to enable a decentralized flexibility provision for Redispatch measures.