Cybersecurity Analysis of Distribution Grid Operation with Distributed Energy Resources via Co-Simulation

As penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs) continue to increase in power grids, many utilities have analyzed their impacts on grid operations. However, cybersecurity impacts of these DERs connecting to the grid have only begun to follow. Especially, analyzing how potential cybersecurity attacks manifest on the grid such as voltage stability and power flows requires modeling both communication network and power grid components, and co-simulating them. In pursuit of this effort, a cyber-physical co-simulation code base is developed to investigate the impact of cybersecurity attacks on distributed energy resource management systems (DERMS), using a communication network simulator (ns-3), a virtual machine emulator (QEMU), an IEEE 1815 communication protocol implementation (Opendnp3), a distribution grid simulator (GridLAB-D) and a hierarchical engine for large-scale infrastructure co-simulation (HELICS). A total of four cybersecurity attack scenarios on a DERMS that manages 20 solar photovoltaic generation inverters are simulated using two feeders of the City of Riverside Public Utilities in California, USA. The impact of the attacks on these feeders is analyzed.