Secured energy ecosystems under Distributed Energy Resources penetration

Renewable energy systems have mushroomed in the form of microgrids and Virtual Power Plants (VPP). In Australia itself, there are over three million Distributed Energy Resources (DERs). Integrating these new energy ecosystems into current systems is becoming a horrendous task as multi-dimensional energy flows and new energy business models are evolving. The stakeholders in the energy sector are focused on reducing costs prematurely while integration standards are still evolving, and interoperability of Internet of things (IoT) with legacy systems has outstanding security concerns. In this paper, the changing energy landscape is examined, and cybersecurity issues associated with the operation of VPPs and renewable energy-based microgrids are highlighted. The security and operational scenarios of new ecosystems are outlined, with an emphasis on DER interoperability, security, and integration. The design and development of these evolving standards into these new energy ecosystems is detailed based on observations from experiments on real-world DER installations. This paper is an extension of work originally reported in proceedings of the 31st Australasian Universities Power Engineering Conference [1].