On Socio-Technical Concerns for Smart Grid Security and Resilience

The future smart grid will make use of ICT to support the inclusion of new renewable energy sources and advanced energy services. In some cases, the Internet will be used as part of this critical infrastructure, e.g., to enable communication with end-user services. Consequently, developing technologies for ensuring the security and resilience of smart grids and the Internet are of paramount importance. For these technologies to be widely adopted, important socio-economic aspects must be considered, which will be addressed in a new EU-funded project, called SPARKS. In this paper, two examples are given of how socio-economic aspects affect security and resilience of smart grid development. The first one outlines the chain-of-custody issue, which might influence the security architecture of a smart grid. The second one outlines a bottleneck in the institutional setting, which might restrict the flexibility and resilience at the distribution level of smart grids.