SBE: Small: Cybersecurity risks of dynamic, two-way distributed electricity markets

美国电网正在从以固定价格从中央发电厂向客户提供电力的单向渠道转变为具有双向信息和电力流动以及动态分布式市场的分布式电网。建立分布式电力市场的好处可能是巨大的。消费者可以作为买方和卖方参与这些市场，公用事业可以减少昂贵的高峰电力负荷和停电风险，公司可以因创新而获得奖励。然而，沿着这些潜在好处的是重大的网络安全和隐私风险。分销市场的参与者可能技术不成熟，使用的能源管理和通信系统不能提供高水平的安全。安全漏洞导致大面积关键基础设施过载或关闭的潜在成本是巨大的。本研究确定了与分布式电力市场相关的潜在安全和隐私风险，提供可接受的风险水平的措施，以及分布式市场的风险降低和性能之间的权衡。研究结果将为公用事业公司、监管机构和其他参与者提供指导，帮助他们设计有效和稳健的市场结构，并提供必要的安全和隐私保护。研究涉及多学科，包括经济学、计算机科学和公共政策。它采用了创新的研究方法，包括访谈，市场结构建模，使用真实的世界用电数据的模拟，数据流建模和安全威胁分析。一个离散事件仿真框架是用来模拟相互作用的代理，将包括分布式电力市场，并估计给定的电网拓扑结构和市场政策的相对福利成本的成本函数。使用真实的用电数据构建和测试软件模拟器，以在多个维度上改变参数并使成本最小化。安全攻击被引入到模拟中，以识别对电网稳定性、市场信任和隐私的影响。真实的世界数据的使用使得能够模拟各种不同的市场结构以及与分布式消费者/生产者和市场控制者的各种投标和响应策略的交互。 该研究在建模和仿真工具的开发和使用方面具有变革性，并使用真实的数据进行测试，以识别与不同市场结构，安全方法和威胁类型相关的安全和隐私风险。

The U.S. electric grid is being transformed from a one-way channel delivering electricity from central power plants to customers at set prices, toward a distributed grid with two-way flows of information and electricity and dynamic distributed markets. The benefits of creating distributed markets for electricity are potentially great. Consumers can participate as buyers and sellers in these markets, utilities can reduce costly peak electricity load and risk of outages, and firms can be rewarded for innovation. However, along with these potential benefits come significant cybersecurity and privacy risks. Participants in distribution-level markets may be technically unsophisticated and use energy management and communications systems that do not provide high levels of security. The potential cost of a security breach that overloads or shuts down large areas of critical infrastructure is immense. This research identifies potential security and privacy risks associated with distributed electricity markets, measures to provide an acceptable level of risk, and trade-offs between risk reduction and performance of distributed markets. The results will provide guidance to utilities, regulators and other participants in designing effective and robust market structures with necessary security and privacy protection.The research is multidisciplinary, including economics, computer science and public policy. It employs an innovative mix of research methods, including interviews, modeling of market structures, simulations using real world electricity use data, modeling of data flows, and security threat analysis. A discrete event simulation framework is used to model interacting agents that will comprise distributed electricity markets and to estimate a cost function for the relative welfare cost of given grid topologies and market policies. A software simulator is constructed and tested using real electricity use data to vary parameters on multiple dimensions and minimize cost. Security attacks are introduced into the simulations to identify impacts on grid stability, market trust and privacy. The use of real world data enables simulation of a wide array of different market structures and interactions with a variety of bidding and response policies on the part of distributed consumers/producers and market controllers. The research is transformative in its development and use of modeling and simulation tools, tested with real data, to identify security and privacy risks associated with different market structures, security methods, and threat types.