RESIST - Resilient Power Grids for the Energy Transition

How can we ensure the resilience of our electricity supply in the face of growing threats and the transition to renewable energy? As part of the Fraunhofer RESIST joint project, the IOSB-AST is researching methods to enhance the cyber resilience of digital substations as key components of future electricity grids.

Historically, the German electricity supply system has been structured as a highly hierarchical, top-down system. A small number of highly critical transmission grids ensure a reliable supply at regional and local level. A failure at this level directly affects a large number of households, businesses and public institutions. The energy transition is fundamentally changing this system: Decentralised generation, bidirectional power flows and the increasing digitalisation of the grid infrastructure are making the electricity supply more efficient – but also more vulnerable. At the same time, the threats posed by extreme weather events, technical failures and targeted cyber-attacks are growing. The key question is therefore: How does one plan and operate a resilient electricity supply for the future?

The overarching aim of RESIST is to make the resilience of the electricity supply measurable, visualisable in real time and optimisable – across all phases of the energy transition. Resilience is understood here as a holistic concept that coherently links technological, economic and regulatory issues. Based on identified outage and disruption scenarios, the consortium is developing two key tools:

• Resilience Monitor: Enables resilient operational management in real time. By forecasting damage scenarios, technical and financial losses can be minimised at an early stage.
• Strategic planning tool: Supports a Resilient-by-Design approach to the long-term transformation of the electricity grid – ensuring that resilience is systematically taken into account right from the planning stage.

These tools are complemented by technical enhancements to key components of the network infrastructure, which are specifically designed to increase their resilience.

Within the Fraunhofer Group, IOSB-AST is responsible for research in the field of IT security and cyber resilience – one of the project’s key priorities. The focus is on the digital (substation) as a critical component of current and future electricity grids.

Why the digital substation? As part of the digitalisation process, substations and switchgear are increasingly being equipped with networked communication and automation technology (e.g. in accordance with IEC 61850). This high level of interconnectivity offers significant operational advantages, but at the same time opens up new vulnerabilities. Traditional IT security concepts are not sufficient in this context – what is required is cyber resilience: the ability not only to fend off attacks, but also to remain operational under attack conditions and to maintain safe operation.

IOSB-AST’s key research areas within the project:

• Decentralised resilience and security assessment – The IOSB-AST is developing methods to assess the resilience of digital wards in a decentralised manner – that is, directly at ward level. This enables a rapid, local assessment of the current security situation without having to rely on centralised systems.
• AI-based detection of IT attacks – Building on the IOSB-AST’s expertise in the field of anomaly detection (see the PROTECT project), research is being conducted into artificial intelligence methods that can reliably detect attacks on the communications infrastructure of digital stations at an early stage.
• Combining resilience and detection methods – One of the project’s innovative approaches is to integrate the results of the security assessment and AI-supported attack detection. This provides a comprehensive situational picture that not only detects attacks but also assesses their impact on the plant’s operational capability and identifies possible courses of action.

This project is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (grant reference: 03SF0637).

• Fraunhofer EMI
• Fraunhofer ISE
• Fraunhofer IEE
• Fraunhofer IEG
• Fraunhofer IOSB-AST