Enhancing Security and Resilience in DER Integration: A Self-Sovereign Identity Approach for Smart Inverters in Virtual Power Plants

Utility companies are expected to leverage privately owned distributed energy resources (DERs) to create virtual power plants (VPPs), which offer promising solutions for maintaining the demand-supply balance efficiently and reducing emissions. Smart inverters play a crucial role in integrating DERs into VPPs, making the security of smart inverters and the reliability of inverter data essential for the successful implementation of secure and effective VPPs. However, traditional public-key infrastructure and X.509 digital certificate-based security approaches (PKIX) are suboptimal in this integration context due to their inherent limitations. Therefore, in this work, we analyse the self-sovereign identity concept in DER integration context and develop a secure and reliable framework for DER integration via smart inverters. The proposed framework aims to overcome the issues associated with the current PKIX-based design and enhance the overall resiliency of the DER integration process by extending the existing industry standards.