The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded an estimated $23 million through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to eight projects to enhance cybersecurity in clean energy infrastructure.
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.”