Berkeley Lab to develop cybersecurity measures related to solar inverters

A new project by the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will seek to develop methods that can detect and counter cyber attacks on the grid related to solar inverters.

DOE awarded $2.5 million over three years to the project, which is one of 20 recently announced projects that aim to enhance cybersecurity on the grid.

The Berkeley Lab project will focus on smart solar inverters, which turn the direct current produced by rooftop solar current into alternating current to be fed into the grid. The industry and government are developing standards for how solar inverters communicate with the grid so that the photovoltaic (PV) modules can adjust their power levels accordingly.

“It is this standardization that presents a vulnerability,” Daniel Arnold, a Berkeley Lab researcher and engineer who is one of the project’s leads, said. “As we modernize the grid, our belief is that we, as a society, can enjoy all of the benefits of large amounts of distributed PV, such as reduced greenhouse gas emissions and a more resilient system, and still have a secure network that is potentially more robust to cyber intrusions than it was before the introduction of large amounts of distributed PV.”

The project seeks to develop algorithms that can watch for irregularities in grid behavior and used to nullify a cyberattack.

“If an attacker tries to manipulate the settings in a number of PV inverters, we’ll observe these manipulations, then identify the settings in PV inverters that have not been hacked, and finally, dispatch the appropriate settings to the inverters deemed safe in order to counter that attack,” Arnold said.

Berkeley Lab is partnering with a number of organizations on this project, including OSISoft, SunSpec Alliance, SolarEdge, HDPV Alliance, Power Standards Lab, Arizona State University, Siemens, the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District.