Ensuring the safe, reliable, and energy-efficient provision of electricity is a complex task for smart grid (SG) management applications. Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing-based SG applications have been proposed for time-responsive monitoring and controlling tasks related to power systems. Recent studies have provided valuable insights into the potential of machine learning algorithms in SGs, covering areas such as generation, distribution, microgrids, consumer energy market, and cyber security. Integrated IoT devices directly exchange data with the SG cloud, which increases the vulnerability and security threats to the energy system. The review aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML) applications in IoT-Integrated SGs, focusing on non-intrusive load monitoring, fault detection, demand forecasting, generation forecasting, energy-management systems, anomaly detection, and energy trading. The study also highlights the importance of data privacy and security when integrating these applications to enable intelligent decision-making in smart grid domains. Furthermore, the review addresses performance issues (e.g., accuracy, latency, and resource constraints) associated with PPML techniques, which may impact the security and overall performance of IoT-integrated SGs. The insights of this study will provide essential guidelines for in-depth research in the field of IoT-integrated smart grid privacy and security in the future.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is a well-established and dynamic field defined by an active research community that has developed numerous effective methods for explaining and interpreting the predictions of advanced machine learning models, including deep neural networks. Clustered Federated Learning (CFL) mitigates the difficulties posed by heterogeneous clients in traditional federated learning by categorizing related clients according to data characteristics, facilitating more tailored model updates, and improving overall learning efficiency. This paper introduces Explainable Clustered Federated Learning (XCFL), which adds explainability to clustered federated learning. Our method improves performance and explainability by selecting features, clustering clients, training local clients, and analyzing contributions using SHAP values. By incorporating feature-level contributions into cluster and global aggregation, XCFL ensures a more transparent and data-driven model update process. Weighted aggregation by feature contributions improves consumer diversity and decision transparency. Our results show that XCFL outperforms FedAvg and other clustering methods. Our feature-based explainability strategy improves model performance and explains how features affect clustering and model adjustments. XCFL’s improved accuracy and explainability make it a promising solution for heterogeneous and distributed learning environments.

Decentralized generation using hybrid renewable energy systems has emerged as economical and technically feasible solution for electrifying remote areas. This study emphases on designing a hybrid system consisting of PV/Wind/Biomass/Biogas energy resources to electrify a remote community in Multan, district of south Punjab. Three Different configurations of the hybrid micro-grid system (PV/Biomass, Wind/Biomass, and PV/Wind/Biomass) are modeled using HOMER Pro software and optimization results are presented. Results of techno-economic analysis shows that all three configurations of proposed hybrid system meet the load demand of 259.44 kWh/day. Further, all three hybrid system configurations in which animal manure is used as biomass resource instead of crops residue are more economical. Slurry produced in such can be used as a fertilizer for crops as Multan is an agricultural area.

Building energy planning is a challenging task in the current mounting climate change scenario because the sector accounts for a reasonable percentage of global end-use energy consumption, with a one-fifth share of global carbon emissions. Energy planners rely on physical model-based prediction tools to conserve energy and make decisions towards decreasing energy consumption. For precise forecasting, such a model requires the collection of an enormous number of input variables, which is time-consuming because not all the parameters are easily available. Utilities are reluctant to share retrievable consumer information because of growing concerns regarding data leakage and competitive energy markets. Federated learning (FL) provides an effective solution by providing privacy preserving distributed training to relieve the computational burden and security concerns associated with centralized vanilla learning. Therefore, we aimed to comparatively analyze the effectiveness of several data-driven prediction algorithms for learning patterns from data-efficient buildings to predict the hourly consumption of the building sector in centralized and FL setups. The results provided comparable insights for predicting building energy consumption in a distributed setup and for generalizing to diverse clients. Moreover, such research can benefit energy designers by allowing them to use appropriate algorithms via transfer learning on data of similar features and to learn personalized models in meta-learning approaches.

Smart advanced metering infrastructure and edge devices show promising solutions in digitalising distributed energy systems. Energy disaggregation of household load consumption provides a better understanding of consumers’ appliance‐level usage patterns. Machine learning approaches enhance the power system's efficiency but this is contingent upon sufficient training samples for efficient and accurate prediction tasks. In a centralised setup, transferring such a substantially high volume of information to the cloud server has a communication bottleneck. Although high‐computing edge devices seek to address such problems, the data scarcity and heterogeneity among clients remain challenges to be addressed. Federated learning offers a compelling solution in such a scenario by leveraging the ML model training at edge devices and aggregating the client's updates at a cloud server. However, FL still faces significant security issues, including the potential eavesdropping by a malicious actor with the intention of stealing clients' information while communicating with an honest‐but‐curious server. The study aims to secure the sensitive information of energy users participating in the nonintrusive load monitoring (NILM) program by integrating differential privacy with a personalised federated learning approach. The Fisher information method was adapted to extract the global model information based on common features, while personalised updates will not be shared with the server for client‐specific features. Similarly, the authors employed an adaptive differential privacy only on the shared local updates (DP‐PFL) while communicating with the server. Experimental results on the Pecan Street and REFIT datasets depict that DP‐PFL exhibits more favourable performance on both the energy prediction and status classification tasks compared to other state‐of‐the‐art DP approaches in federated NILM.