Resilient, Cyber Secure Centralized Substation Protection

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Program:
OPEN 2018
Award:
$2,350,288
Location:
Atlanta, Georgia
Status:
ACTIVE
Project Term:
07/12/2019 - 04/04/2024

Technology Description:

The Georgia Tech Research Corporation will design an autonomous, resilient and cyber-secure protection and control system for each power plant and substation on its grid. This will eliminate complex coordinated protection settings and transform the protection practice into a simpler, intelligent, automated and transparent process. The technology will integrate protective relays into an intelligent protection scheme that relies on existing high data redundancy in substations to (a) validate data; (b) detect hidden failures and in this case self-heal the protection and control system; (c) detect cyber-attacks (focus on false data and/or malicious control injection) and identify the source for attribution; and (d) provide the full state of the system with minimal delay for optimal full state feedback control.

Potential Impact:

The proposed technologies simplify grid protection by eliminating the need for coordination, lessening relay misoperations, and enabling detection and self-healing against cyber attacks and hidden failures.

Security:

A protected grid would be more resilient to disruptions from equipment failure, natural disasters, or attack.

Environment:

Enabling increased use of wind and solar-generated power would result in a substantial decrease in carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S.—40% of which are produced by electricity generation.

Economy:

A protected grid would help shield U.S. businesses from costly power outages and brownouts that stop automated equipment, bring down factories, and crash computers.

Contact

ARPA-E Program Director:
Dr. Jonathan Glass
Project Contact:
Prof. Athanasios P Meliopoulos
Press and General Inquiries Email:
ARPA-E-Comms@hq.doe.gov
Project Contact Email:
sakis.m@gatech.edu

Partners

Southern Company
Electric Power Research Institute, Inc. (EPRI)

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Release Date:
12/13/2017