Solar Energy Cybersecurity

Professors at the University of Georgia and University of Arkansas, along with other industry and academic experts, are working on methods to improve solar energy cybersecurity processes and protocols.  This is critical, because there is a strong push across many areas of the U.S. for increased usage of renewable energy sources, of which solar energy is the most common form. 

Why Better Solar Energy Cybersecurity is Critical

The two universities are leading the “cyber defense project,” which has been allocated a $3.6 million grant from the Department of Energy (DOE) aimed at safely integrating solar energy into the grid.  Other participants include researchers from the University of Illinois, Texas A&M University, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and General Electric. 

The reason this is important is because adding new generation sources, like solar farms, to the grid can introduce soft access points for hackers, and in general it is easier to attack distributed access points than a centralized generator. 

PV inverters are the components that are used to connect solar generation units to the grid, but even beyond these connection points, the greater the number of connections present in the system, the greater the chances of introducing potential backdoor entry points.

Therefore, the professors are planning to develop algorithms and machine learning techniques that can predict and react to cyber-attacks in an effective and efficient manner.  They also aim to fortify the inverters themselves, and to add new layers of complementary security measures. 

The bottom line is that we are living in a new world where everything is connected, which makes cybersecurity more important than it has ever been before.  And given the climate change induced pressures to add more and more distributed energy resources (DERs) to the grid, the importance of solar energy cybersecurity will only increase in the years to come.