A Software Sensor-Based Protection Against Cyber-Physical Attacks in Power Systems with High Penetration of DERs

Towards the global goal of the decarbonization, more and more renewable distributed energy resources (DERs) are integrating into the power system. These IoT devices are numerous and controlled by commercial third parties, which changes the communication mode and lacks sufficient security standards and protections. They might be compromised ma-liciously and become the entrance to attack the distributed renewable power generation systems, which could cause chaos of the electrical markets and even large scale blackouts across the power grid. In this paper, considering the characteristics of the DERs, we propose a three tier protection framework including device layer, network layer and application layer to protect the distributed renewable power generation system from the cyber-physical threats and achieve its self-immunity. Particularly, we propose the software sensor method on the device layer based on the techniques of system identification and Kalman filter to accurately estimate the system states and thus protect the system from attacks.