Effects of Cyber Attacks on AC and High-Voltage DC Interconnected Power Systems with Emulated Inertia

Kaikai Pan, Jingwei Dong, Elyas Rakhshani and Peter Palensky
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Kaikai Pan: Department of Electrical Sustainable Energy, Delft University of Technology, 2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands
Jingwei Dong: Department of Electrical Sustainable Energy, Delft University of Technology, 2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands
Elyas Rakhshani: Department of Electrical Sustainable Energy, Delft University of Technology, 2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands
Peter Palensky: Department of Electrical Sustainable Energy, Delft University of Technology, 2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands

Energies, 2020, vol. 13, issue 21, 1-24

Abstract: The high penetration of renewable energy resources and power electronic-based components has led to a low-inertia power grid which would bring challenges to system operations. The new model of load frequency control (LFC) must be able to handle the modern scenario where controlled areas are interconnected by parallel AC/HVDC links and storage devices are added to provide virtual inertia. Notably, vulnerabilities within the communication channels for wide-area data exchange in LFC loops may make them exposed to various cyber attacks, while it still remains largely unexplored how the new LFC in the AC/HVDC interconnected system with emulated inertia would be affected under malicious intrusions. Thus, in this article, we are motivated to explore possible effects of the major types of data availability and integrity attacks—Denial of Service (DoS) and false data injection (FDI) attacks—on such a new LFC system. By using a system-theoretic approach, we explore the optimal strategies that attackers can exploit to launch DoS or FDI attacks to corrupt the system stability. Besides, a comparison study is performed to learn the impact of these two types of attacks on LFC models of power systems with or without HVDC link and emulated inertia. The simulation results on the the exemplary two-area system illustrate that both DoS and FDI attacks can cause large frequency deviations or even make the system unstable; moreover, the LFC system with AC/HVDC interconnections and emulated inertia could be more vulnerable to these two types of attacks in many adversarial scenarios.

Keywords: AC/HVDC interconnections; load frequency control; virtual inertia; Denial of Service; false data injection; attack impact (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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