The DOE said Thursday the research, development and demonstration projects aim to develop tools and technologies that protect clean energy infrastructure—including distributed energy resources, or DER, inverter-based resources and virtual power plants—from cyber threats.
The projects selected by the DOE Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security and Emergency Response, or CESER, include:
- University of Arkansas – high-speed programmable networks that secure communications in DER aggregations by reducing manual effort and response time to cyber attacks
- University of Arkansas – artificial intelligence-driven cybersecurity toolkit for inverter-based resources to help operators determine cyber attacks and design mitigation strategies
- Electric Power Research Institute – technical specifications to aid energy companies in selecting cybersecurity capabilities for their DER gateway products and demonstrate them in commercial products and open-source software
- Georgia Tech Research Corp. – a framework that allows operators of renewable energy systems to detect and patch infected devices and back up sensitive data
- MITRE – a toolkit for wind generation asset operators to quickly respond and recover from cyberattacks, allowing remote access to a device’s memory and AI analysis
- Texas A&M University – enhanced monitoring capabilities and cyber-physical resilience of IBR and DER components like solar photovoltaic systems
- University of Texas-Arlington – an encryption framework that secures communications between a cloud and its DER in a virtual power plant
- Washington State University – advanced 5G capabilities and networking tools to enhance global visibility and management of grid-edge DER
Puesh Kumar, director of CESER, said, “Securely monitoring, detecting, communicating and mitigating cyber threats is essential if we are going to realize our clean energy goals.”