DOE Funds New Cyber Research to Protect Clean Energy Infrastructure

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced eight projects that will receive nearly $23 million in cumulative funding through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) to develop new tools and technologies to improve cybersecurity in clean energy infrastructure. The projects, selected by the DOE Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER), will lead to next generation tools and technologies and reduce disruptions to energy delivery from a cyber incident, supporting the Biden-Harris administration’s clean energy and cybersecurity objectives.  

“These investments are focused on the cybersecurity of clean energy infrastructure,” said CESER Director Puesh M. Kumar. “Securely monitoring, detecting, communicating, and mitigating cyber threats is essential if we are going to realize our clean energy goals.” 

The selected research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) projects focus on detecting and mitigating cyber threats to clean energy infrastructure, including distributed energy resources (DERs), inverter-based resources (IBRs) and virtual power plants (VPPs).  

The selected projects include: 

• University of Arkansas will improve secure communications within DER aggregations using high-speed programmable networks, which could significantly reduce manual effort and response time to cyber attacks.  
• University of Arkansas will develop a new cybersecurity toolkit for inverter-based resources (IBR) using artificial intelligence (AI), which could help operators understand the cause of a cyber attack and inform the design of mitigation strategies.  
• The Electric Power Research Institute will develop technical specifications to support energy companies in finding the appropriate cybersecurity features to ensure their DER gateway products meet industry standards. The project will implement and demonstrate the viability of these cybersecurity capabilities in commercial products and open-source software.   
• The Georgia Tech Research Corporation will create a framework that will enable operators of renewable energy systems to not only find infected devices and patch them, but also to pre-emptively back up sensitive data for better intrusion recovery.  
• The MITRE Corporation will develop a toolkit for wind generation asset operators to use to quickly respond to and recover from a cyber attack, allowing them to receive a device’s memory remotely and analyze it using AI. 
• Texas A&M University will bolster the monitoring capabilities and cyber-physical resilience of IBR and other vital components of DER, such as solar photovoltaic systems, using a combination of innovative methods. 
• University of Texas-Arlington will use a new encryption framework to reduce cyber risks by securing the communications between a cloud and its associated DER in a multi-partied virtual power plant (VPP). Depending on the cyber incidents, the system reconfiguration will include communication rerouting, service reallocation, and computing rescheduling, to account for compromised communication node, DER, and clouds.  
• Washington State University will leverage the next generation capabilities of 5G communication networks and novel networking tools to provide global visibility into the grid-edge, improving the management and operation of DER.   

For more information about the funding opportunity announcement, please visit here. 

For more information about CESER’s work to secure and protect America’s energy sector, visit: www.energy.gov/ceser.