USA Awards $39MM R&D Funding for Energy Cybersecurity Solutions

The USA Department of Energy (DOE) said Tuesday it has awarded $39 million in grants to national laboratories for projects exploring solutions to protect so-called distributed energy resources (DER) from cyberattacks.

The funding covers, according to a DOE press release, "utility-scale solar, wind, storage and other clean technologies; behind-the-meter renewables and storage systems; electric vehicle chargers; and other customer-owned devices".

Given to nine projects, the funding "will support targeted research, development, and demonstration related to different elements of the DER landscape, underscoring the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to strengthening the nation’s energy and national security", the news release said.

Puesh Kumar, director of the DOE's Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security and Emergency Response, said in a statement, “Distributed energy resources are critical to reaching President Biden’s ambitious clean energy and climate goals, and ensuring the cybersecurity of those resources is important to building a resilient energy future for all Americans".

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has received $4,924,627 for the development of "an emulation-based analysis framework to better understand cyber-vulnerabilities and provide mitigation strategies to guide utilities and other stakeholders operating DERs in disadvantaged communities", the DOE said.

"The framework will use techniques combining offline analysis and modeling of integrated DER systems to better understand the cybersecurity impacts of the clean energy transition on those communities".

The Sandia National Laboratory has been allotted the same amount to "research and develop a reference model for DER communication protocols using IPv6 and OT SDN".

The same lab has bagged a further $4,900,004 for a project that will be "looking to inspect encrypted DER traffic at the cloud/utility firewall and will act as a template for all DER vendors, operators, aggregators, and utilities", the DOE said.

"This will allow the industry entities to deploy defense-in-depth solutions for DER Management Systems with Next Generation Firewalls and Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response solutions".

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has been granted $4,895,989 for its work on software that would "allow utilities to share relevant cybersecurity information with one another in a manner that does not compromise the privacy of customers in their service territories, thereby reducing utilities’ reluctance to share information arising from privacy–related liabilities". The same lab scored a separate $4,872,397 for the development of "cybersecurity detection tools for aggregations of DER" to help secure power grids.

For its efforts in "generic security solutions for the public or hybrid clouds", the Brookhaven National Laboratory has received $3,841,209. "These cloud solutions have been adopted by utilities to target real-time DER applications providing frequency and voltage support to the power grid, specifically through multiple virtual power plants", the DOE said.

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been allocated $3,692,896 for a project incorporating "principles of DER system physics into various machine learning-based applications for a comprehensive approach to cyber resilience including vulnerability analysis, attack detection and mitigation, as well as system recovery for DER system operations".

The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has received $3,496,485 to "develop algorithms and an artificial intelligence/machine learning tool for operators to demonstrate human-machine teaming".

The Argonne National Laboratory has been granted $3,484,765 to try to develop an "Intrusion Diagnostic Unit cybersecurity software tool for DER aggregators to securely participate in wholesale energy markets".

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