A multidisciplinary team of researchers at Syracuse University was awarded a $344,184 grant from the National Science Foundation to pursue a two-year research project on the potential creation of cybersecurity threats with the modernization of electric power grids.

The modernization will be done through the development of smart grid technologies and the decentralization of energy markets.

The team is led by Jason Dedrick, a professor at the SU School of Information Studies, according to an SU News release.

Three other researchers will work with Dedrick, according to the release: Peter Wilcoxen, a professor of public administration and international affairs at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs; Steve Chapin, an associate professor of computer science at the College of Engineering and Computer Science; and Keli Perrin, the assistant director of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism.

“What I think makes us unique is that we are very interdisciplinary,” said Wilcoxen, who noted that although there is a large amount of research being conducted on the emergence of smart grid technologies, most research teams are solely composed of engineers.

Included in United States President Barack Obama’s $831 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 — commonly referred to as simply “the stimulus” — was $4.5 billion for the modernization of the country’s electric power grid.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, the DOE, the electricity industry and the Smart Grid Investment Grant program have jointly invested $8 billion in modernization efforts since the inception of the stimulus package.

These modernization efforts include “smart” technologies.

Both Chapin and Wilcoxen said separately that a number of states, including California, New York and Massachusetts, are currently looking into regulating smart grid technologies.

“The smart grid implies that metering … includes sensors that report usage back at a much finer granularity than the traditional, old-fashion meter that would be read once a month,” Chapin said. “It also implies that much more of the grid infrastructure is network connected and controllable. So you can have such things as demand response.”

According to the DOE, demand response “provides an opportunity for consumers to play a significant role in the operation of the electric grid by reducing or shifting their electricity usage during peak periods in response to time-based rates or other forms of financial incentives.”

Consumers could use their own personal solar panels or wind turbines to help distribute energy in a smart grid, Chapin said.

“Rather than having these large monolithic power generation systems, we now have distributed generation,” Chapin said. “We can have thousands of different small (energy) generating systems.”

With a smart grid, consumers will be able to sell their electricity into the grid and bid that they will either take demand offline and receive monetary compensation in the form of a decreased electric bill, or they will generate power to sell into the grid, Chapin said.

The team’s main goal will be to analyze the potential cyber threats to market stability that can potentially arise from this new decentralized energy system, and the resulting distributed markets, found within the smart grid concept.

Threats the team will analyze include the potential for actors to use Distributed Denial of Service attacks to disrupt markets, and the ability for actors to make false energy bids, Wilcoxen said.

“Our goal, actually, is to try to help the devices and the systems that are used to manage these distributed markets be designed in a way that prevents some of these kinds of attacks,” Wilcoxen said. “So security by design, rather than security bolted on afterwards.”

Published on November 28, 2016 at 12:26 am

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