Briefing: Information security in community energy

There are many community energy schemes. Their number and variety are increasing briskly. They bring new kinds of information into existence and they handle existing kinds of information in new ways. They share, to varying degrees, vulnerabilities to a wide range of information security threats. Those threats include new opportunities for crime and terrorism. At the extreme, their effects include danger to persons through interference with their ‘critical home infrastructure’ such as heating, lighting and refrigeration. The excitement of the novelty of community energy, and the focus of thinking on flows of energy and of money, means that often the flows of information, and their security, are not being considered as carefully as they ought to be.