CESER awards $12M in cooperative agreements for cybersecurity solutions among distribution, municipal utilities

The Department of Energy’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security and Emergency Response (CESER) will award $12 million in cooperative agreements over the next three years to create and distribute cybersecurity solutions for distribution and municipal utilities.

CESER will cooperate with the American Public Power Association (APPA) and the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), under congressional direction. The National Energy Technology Laboratory will also be involved in the effort to develop and demonstrate the final cyber and cyber-physical solutions, which will detect and respond to risks through a mix of community-led information sharing, artificial intelligence, and autonomous defense, while providing advanced analytics to detect when and where compromises occur, as well as increased resilience overall.

Between APPA and NRECA, nearly 50 million customers and more than 900 electric cooperatives, public power districts, and public utility districts stand to benefit from these efforts.

“APPA and NRECA understand the specific security needs of their memberships, and the relationships the associations have with small distribution and municipal power providers nationwide will help take the solutions that are developed and rapidly put them to real-world use,” Sean Plankey, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for CESER, said. “As the final link in the chain of secure electric delivery, these community-owned companies and cooperatives rely heavily on the types of shared security resources we are aiming to provide through this initiative.”

The result should be deployed by 2023 and will offer a mix of hardware, firmware, and/or software solutions to protect operational technology components and assure the safe control of the systems that deliver electric power throughout the United States.