Are power users critical for grid resilience? The perception of the security of supply is changing.

Photo: Bharat Siddam, Pixabay

Cyberattacks on grids may disrupt power supply as nowadays computers are steering the volumes. Are we willing to have a transforming station at home?

Power grids are a kind of skeleton or nervous system of the country. There are grids with higher and lower frequencies that are subordinated to the volumes of transmitted energy/electricity. Electricity can be transmitted via cables like the undersea one connecting Poland and Sweden as well as via the transmission network that we all see out of our windows. People use cables for their phones, computers, air-conditioners, kitchen appliances, and other stuff without which we can not efficiently function in the current reality.

Scientists from Princeton and MIT have published a study in PNAS titled “Resilience of the Electric Grid Through Trustworthy IoT-Coordinated Assets.” In their research, they propose that devices connected to each other via the Internet could be a solution to the increasing number of cyberattacks on electrical grids. These attacks can disrupt the operations of hospitals, as medical equipment relies on a continuous power supply, and they can also impact critical industries, where production lines depend on electricity.

Who is to pay for the security?

The power market shapes the electricity volumes needed to feed appliances and equipment to work. There are peak loads as well as lower demand for the electricity during daily cycle. We therefore tend to sleep at night and factories are closed at that time as the main human activity occurs during the day. Of course, there are economy branches that work the whole day/night shift but, in general, the use of electricity is lower at night.

Cyberattacks aiming to disrupt the transmission usually during the peak load are directed to transmission stations to switch off a certain group of users. The facilities, simplifying, are sharing electricity inflows via a high-frequency network for smaller volumes distributed via the lower-frequencies network and then to final receivers. The key is to ensure timely amounts are on the covered land because a blackout, or loss of power in the network, causes problems for everyone. This is why the resilience against cyberattacks and thus disruption of electricity volumes or changes in volumes scheduled to a certain distribution area is crucial for the security of the power supply.

• The resilience could be enhanced through the coordination of resources at the grid edge that are trustable and resilient, say Vineet J. Nair, Partha S. Sarker, and Vincent Poor of MIT, West Virginia University, and Princeton. 

They add, that such coordination can be enabled through a suite of market operators suitably located in a distribution grid. In other words, these should be located where electricity is being supplied. And that means receivers who need it to perform/undertake daily tasks. Moreover, as the scientists claim,  this coordination may mitigate attacks of different levels of severity, with attack magnitudes that range from 5 to 40 percent of the total peak load. However, that approach might signal the necessity to change the grid topology as usually in many grid systems transforming stations are located at the entry point for electricity inflow not at the point of its final use.

Does it mean an additional price for power use or yet another space for certification of appliances that are widely used.? That has not been emphasized, yet. The clear thing is though the perception of the security of the electricity supply is changing. Why? Possibly because the scale of remote disruptions is increasing.