The US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is developing a new cybersecurity system that will check hackers from causing damage to the country’s power grid as well as electrical equipment.
NREL of US developing cybersecurity system to protect smart grids from hackersThe US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is developing a new cybersecurity system that will check hackers from causing damage to the country’s power grid as well as electrical equipment.
Under the new initiative, the power grid of the country will be converted to a ‘smart grid’ system that will be able to use renewable energy as well as become more efficient and more reliable.
The White House and the Energy Department have already asked for changing the power grid of the nation and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 has awarded $4.5bn to the Energy Department to modernise the electric power grid.
As per the power grid improvement initiative, communication and control devices to remote corners of the power grid will be added to increase situational alertness of the grids to their respective utilities.
The alerts will help the utilities to act quickly to repair anomalies in the power grid.
NREL’s Erfan Ibrahim said: "If you look at utilities today, and independent power producers, you will see a tremendous appetite now for cybersecurity solutions that work.
"Unfortunately, utilities currently have to rely on the sales pitches presented to them by the cybersecurity vendors.
"And this is where I believe that research labs, especially national research labs, have a unique role to play. The time for hype is over."
The technology, used in cybersecurity test bed, will help to keep the smart grid system secure. The cybersecurity test bed to be build at NREL’s Energy Systems Integration Facility has a system that hides a ‘token’ within the first packet of each communication session.
The test bed for Secure Distributed Grid Management, a hardware system, which mimics the communications, power systems, and cybersecurity layers for a utility’s power distribution system will be build by NREL’s Brian Miller and Erfan Ibrahim , David Cronin of DC Systems, Duane Petersen (then with Scitor Corporation), Brandon Hjella of FireEye.
Ibrahim added: "Before you go deploying something out in the field, don’t just take a point test in the lab and extrapolate to production; you need something in between.
"And that’s the test bed. With our power-hardware-in-the-loop testing in our test bed, we can scale up and run full-scale experiments — some real, some simulated — before a company goes into production with a new product."
The test bed has both hardware and software, which will be used by utilities to control a distribution system that involves a distribution management system, an enterprise data management system, and two substation management systems.
Image: FireEye’s Brandon Hjella works with Duane Petersen (then with Scitor Corporation) on the Test Bed for Secure Distributed Grid. Photo: courtesy of Dennis Schroeder