Distributed Decision-making and Resilience in a Renewable-rich Power Grid

The power grid has evolved from a physical system to a cyber-physical system that consists of digital devices that perform measurement, control, communication, computation, and actuation. With increased penetration in distributed energy resources (DER) that include renewable generation, flexible loads, and storage, these devices can be as large as 8 billion in number just in the US grid, many of whom are capable of monitoring and making crucial decisions. While these devices provide extraordinary opportunities for improvements in efficiency and sustainability, they also introduce new vulnerabilities in the form of cyberattacks. This brings up the following question: How can we ensure grid resilience in the face of escalating cyber threats while accommodating the intermittent and distributed nature of DERs?

In this talk, we’ll dive into this important question, and explore a framework that enables distributed decision-making and control. This framework is built around a local electricity market with a hierarchical structure that accommodates the distributed ownership of DERs, both in location and time as well as physical constraints due to power physics. This talk will explore the relation between market mechanisms, distributed optimization, and resilience for the grid. A variety of attack surfaces including those that compromise large IoT (internet-of-things) networks will be considered. The use of distributed visibility and the related situational awareness to the operators will be examined through simulation studies of a distribution grid with 100,000 nodes. The role of distributed decision-making principles of optimization and control in prevention, resilience, and detection & isolation will be examined.

Speaker: Anu Annaswamy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology