Hybrid cyber protection of Distributed Energy Resources Operational Technology (HyDER-OT)

The energy sector has seen an increase in cyber-attack frequency and magnitude over the years due to the potential for social and economic gains. This risk is only expected to proliferate as the speed and velocity of distributed energy resources (DER) deployments across the nation due to interest in sustainability and favorable financial incentives. It is imperative to ensure appropriate cybersecurity postures are identified and adopted to ensure the safe deployment and reliable operation of our national electric power grid, while helping to drive our social, economic and sustainability goals. The Hybrid cyber protection DER-Operation Technology (HyDER-OT) project is to develop a fault-tolerant, attack-resilient, multi-party system, which employs zero-trust, distributed architecture, state-of-the-art Intrusion Detection System (IDS) protection and mitigation schemes, and a retrofittable, hardware-based, multi-source sensor fused field device. This multi-layer cybersecurity solution enhances the performance and reliability of DERs, thereby improving grid resiliency and the security of operational technologies. In Phase I, the team demonstrated the feasibility of the zero-trust framework of the HyDER-OT platform, ensuring data provenance for DER data/information exchanges. The team tested the embedded field control device in a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) environment, demonstrating its performance for DER cyber protection. The team evaluated various intrusion detection and mitigation solutions and explored integration pathways to provide multi-level situational awareness, intrusion detection, and mitigation. The team identified multiple use cases of HyDER-OT with various scenarios for HyDER-OT pilot demonstration. The project team will further develop, test, and refine the HyDER-OT platform, focusing on robustness, adaptability, and scalability, to various cyber-attack scenarios and energy system/grid configurations. The project team will advance the technology readiness level of the HyDER-OT beyond PoC in furtherance of the project objectives and deploy onto partner sites for demonstration. This HyDER-OT solution is aimed to help DER asset developers, owners, operators, and aggregators, as well as grid operators and other relevant organizations, to bolster their ability to monitor, detect, restore critical infrastructure of DER-loaded smart grids in response to weather- related or cyber threats. HyDER-OT is designed to maintain high availability with fault-tolerant architecture and self-healing strategies, highly scalable with standardization and interoperability, and capable of securely managing thousands of upcoming and legacy smart grid devices, while helping to secure the underlying communication and physical layers for their operation.