Protecting the Future Grid: An Electric Vehicle Robust Mitigation Scheme Against Load Altering Attacks on Power Grids

TL;DR

This paper proposes a robust control scheme using EVs as a defense mechanism to mitigate load-altering attacks on power grids, ensuring stability despite uncertainties and attack variations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel EV-based mitigation scheme utilizing robust control theory and LMIs, specifically designed to counteract load-altering attacks on power grids.

Findings

The scheme effectively stabilizes the grid under various LA attacks.

It maintains grid stability despite uncertainties in EV connections.

Demonstrated success on the New England 39-bus grid with multiple attack scenarios.

Abstract

Due to the growing threat of climate change, the worlds governments have been encouraging the adoption of Electric Vehicles (EVs). As a result, EV numbers have been growing exponentially which will introduce a large EV charging load into the power grid. On this basis, we present a scheme to utilize EVs as a defense mechanism to mitigate Load-Altering (LA) attacks against the grid. The developed scheme relies on robust control theory and Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs). Our EV-based defense mechanism is formulated as a feedback controller synthesized using H-2 and H-infinity control techniques to eliminate the impact of unknown LA attacks. The controller synthesis considers the grid topology and the uncertainties of the EV connection to the grid. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed mitigation scheme, it is tested against three types of LA attacks on the New England 39-bus grid. We test our mitigation scheme against 800 MW static, switching, and dynamic attacks in the presence of multiple sources of uncertainty that can affect the EV load during deployment. The results demonstrate how the grid remains stable under the LA attacks that would otherwise lead to serious instabilities.