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输送电力的单向通道转变为信息和电力双向流动的分布式电网和动态的分布式市场。为电力创造分布式市场的好处可能是巨大的。消费者可以作为买家和卖家参与这些市场，公用事业公司可以降低昂贵的峰值电力负荷和停电风险，公司可以因创新而获得回报。然而，伴随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在技术上并不复杂，他们使用的能源管理和通信系统不能提供很高的安全性。安全漏洞导致关键基础设施大面积超载或关闭，其潜在成本是巨大的。这项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，以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。研究涉及多个学科，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组合，包括访谈、市场结构建模、使用真实世界用电数据进行模拟、数据流建模和安全威胁分析。离散事件仿真框架被用来对组成分布式电力市场的交互主体进行建模，并估计给定电网拓扑和市场政策的相对福利成本的成本函数。构建了一个软件模拟器，并利用实际用电数据进行了测试，以改变多个维度上的参数并使成本最小化。在模拟中引入了安全攻击，以确定对电网稳定性、市场信任和隐私的影响。使用真实世界的数据能够模拟各种不同的市场结构，以及分布式消费者/生产者和市场控制者与各种投标和响应政策的相互作用。这项研究在开发和使用建模和模拟工具方面具有变革性意义，通过真实数据进行测试，以确定与不同市场结构、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.