Resilience of the Electric Grid through Trustable IoT-Coordinated Assets (Extended version)

TL;DR

This paper presents a framework leveraging IoT devices and local markets to enhance electric grid resilience against cyberattacks by coordinating trustable distributed energy resources.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach for grid resilience using IoT-coordinated assets and trustability assessment through a local electricity market.

Findings

Cyberattack mitigation using trustable local resources

Effective coordination of distributed energy resources

Validation through co-simulation and hardware-in-the-loop

Abstract

The electricity grid has evolved from a physical system to a cyber-physical system with digital devices that perform measurement, control, communication, computation, and actuation. The increased penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs) including renewable generation, flexible loads, and storage provides extraordinary opportunities for improvements in efficiency and sustainability. However, they can introduce new vulnerabilities in the form of cyberattacks, which can cause significant challenges in ensuring grid resilience. We propose a framework in this paper for achieving grid resilience through suitably coordinated assets including a network of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. A local electricity market is proposed to identify trustable assets and carry out this coordination. Situational Awareness (SA) of locally available DERs with the ability to inject power or reduce consumption is enabled by the market, together with a monitoring procedure for their trustability and commitment. With this SA, we show that a variety of cyberattacks can be mitigated using local trustable resources without stressing the bulk grid. Multiple demonstrations are carried out using a high-fidelity co-simulation platform, real-time hardware-in-the-loop validation, and a utility-friendly simulator.