Effects of Cyber Attacks on AC and High-Voltage DC Interconnected Power Systems with Emulated Inertia

Abstract

The high penetration of renewable energy resources and power electronic-based components has led to a low-inertia power grid which would bring challenges to system operations. The new model of load frequency control (LFC) must be able to handle the modern scenario where controlled areas are interconnected by parallel AC/HVDC links and storage devices are added to provide virtual inertia. Notably, vulnerabilities within the communication channels for wide-area data exchange in LFC loops may make them exposed to various cyber attacks, while it still remains largely unexplored how the new LFC in the AC/HVDC interconnected system with emulated inertia would be affected under malicious intrusions. Thus, in this article, we are motivated to explore possible effects of the major types of data availability and integrity attacks—Denial of Service (DoS) and false data injection (FDI) attacks—on such a new LFC system. By using a system-theoretic approach, we explore the optimal strategies that attackers can exploit to launch DoS or FDI attacks to corrupt the system stability. Besides, a comparison study is performed to learn the impact of these two types of attacks on LFC models of power systems with or without HVDC link and emulated inertia. The simulation results on the the exemplary two-area system illustrate that both DoS and FDI attacks can cause large frequency deviations or even make the system unstable; moreover, the LFC system with AC/HVDC interconnections and emulated inertia could be more vulnerable to these two types of attacks in many adversarial scenarios.

A Comprehensive Study of Cyber Attack Mitigation with the Exchange of Frequency Containment Reserves Control in a Multi-Infeed Direct Current Power System

“…An attacker can use a variety of tactics to initiate DoS attacks. For instance, the attacker can saturate the network with traffic, target the routing protocols, infiltrate devices and stop them from providing data, and jam the communication channels [ 10 ].…”

“…Recent investigations have shown that if a certain number of sensor nodes are hacked, conventional authentication measures cannot stop an FDI attack. In this study [ 10 ], a mathematical equation was used to describe a characteristic of grid parameters during an FDI attack, especially at specific times.…”

“…As a result, the application of E-FCR control operations has led to increases in vulnerability to cyber attacks. The analysis of cyber threat modeling has been increasing in the deployment of smart grids, including HVDC technologies, especially after crucial incidents, e.g., the 2015 Ukraine blackouts that occurred after hackers used DoS and FDI attacks on the smart grid devices of the network system [ 10 ].…”

Energy Transition for a sustainable society

“…Misuse of communication systems may bring extra challenges. Cyber attacks may attempt to exploit system vulnerabilities (Pan et al, 2020). Understanding modes of attack and system vulnerabilities potentially leading to blackouts allows to design simulation frameworks to analyze impacts and to protect against such attacks (Rajkumar et al, 2020).…”